Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in White Bear Lake, MN

White Bear Lake is a city in Ramsey County, Minnesota (with a small portion in Washington County), founded in 1858, incorporated as a village on February 18, 1881, and as a city on October 11, 1921.

The city sits on White Bear Lake, one of the largest lakes in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area, a fishing lake known for largemouth and smallmouth bass, northern pike and other species.

White Bear Lake had 24,883 residents at the 2020 census, living in 10,447 households.

The city's name comes from a Native American legend of a Sioux maiden and a Chippewa brave who fought a great white bear on Manitou Island - a story Mark Twain retold, with a happier ending, in his memoir Life on the Mississippi.

White Bear Lake's motto is 'City of Lakes and Legends,' and locals nicknamed it 'Beartown' or simply 'WBL.'

The railroad transformed White Bear Lake: on September 10, 1868, the Lake Superior and Mississippi Railroad opened its extension to the town, and by 1874 Mark Twain had already featured it as a resort in Life on the Mississippi.

In its Gilded Age resort heyday, White Bear Lake was lined with grand hotels and pavilions - Barnum's hotel became the Leip House with a ballroom and bowling alley, and the 1879 Ramaley Pavilion was called perhaps the finest structure around the lake.

The C.P. Noyes Cottage, known as the Fillebrown House, was built in 1879 and later donated to the White Bear Lake Area Historical Society, which preserves the stories of the five communities touching the lake's shore.

In 2019 White Bear Lake voters approved what was then the largest school bond measure in Minnesota to build a brand-new downtown high school, which opened for the 2024-2025 school year and united all grades 9-12 on one campus.

White Bear Lake Area Schools operate as Independent School District 624, and Century College is associated with the city's east side.