Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in St. Peter, MN

St. Peter is the county seat of Nicollet County, set in the scenic Minnesota River valley about 10 miles north of Mankato on U.S. Highway 169.

St. Peter was founded in 1853 by Captain William Bigelow Dodd, who called the settlement Rock Bend for a rock formation at a bend of the Minnesota River; it was renamed St. Peter in 1855 by the Saint Peter Company.

St. Peter was incorporated in 1873, and its population was 12,066 at the 2020 census, with about 4,059 households in Census Bureau figures for 2020-2024.

St. Peter nearly became the capital of Minnesota: in 1857 the territorial legislature moved to name it capital, but legislator Joe Rolette famously stole the bill and hid with it until the session ended, leaving the capital in Saint Paul.

Because its founders expected it to become the capital, St. Peter was platted with extra-wide streets, and Minnesota Square Park was reserved as the site for the capitol building.

St. Peter has been the home of five past governors of Minnesota, an unusual distinction for a city of its size.

St. Peter is home to Gustavus Adolphus College, a private Swedish Lutheran liberal arts college founded in 1862 that hosts the annual Nobel Conference and has received visits from the King of Sweden.

On March 29, 1998, an F3 tornado tore through St. Peter and the Gustavus campus, breaking 80 percent of the campus's windows, uprooting more than 2,000 mature trees and causing an estimated $50 million in damage — yet the college reopened just three weeks later.

Just north of town, the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux was signed on July 23, 1851, ceding roughly 24 million acres of Dakota land to the United States; the site is interpreted today by the Treaty Site History Center.

St. Peter's entire downtown and about a dozen individual buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.