North Star Voices: Minnesota Trolleys - The Rise & Fall

Overview

See the city as it once was and dive into the history of the trolleys that traversed Minnesota’s landscape. Horse cars were the first public transit system in the Twin Cities. Later came the San Francisco-type cable cars. A few were powered by steam, batteries and gas engines. Then when Minnesota's first electric streetcars were introduced in 1888, hundreds of people lined up to try them. As the primary mode of urban transportation, they shaped the development in cities all over the state and the landscape that we know today. Some connected cities with each other and even crossed state lines into Wisconsin and North Dakota. Most disappeared by the 1930s, but the Twin Cities system lasted until 1954, and is now Metro Transit. During this program view photographs and objects from our collection that highlight this hidden history.

Speaker Aaron Isaacs has volunteered with the Minnesota Streetcar Museum for 50 years as a motorman, historian and editor. He is the co-author of Twin Cities by Trolley, The Streetcar Era in Minneapolis-St. Paul (University of Minnesota Press 2007), and author of Twin Ports by Trolley, The Streetcar Era in Duluth-Superior (University of Minnesota Press 2014) and Twin Cities Trolleys in Color (Morning Sun Books 2017). He's the editor of the Museum's quarterly Twin City Lines history magazine.