BY ED FELIEN
Highland Village was the home of the first European settlement in the Minnesota Territory. When the U.S. government established Fort Snelling at the juncture of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, in 1819, a small settlement of Swiss and French-Canadian immigrants grew up around it. Eventually the settlement moved across the Mississippi to what is now Highland Village. The most notable native of that community was Pierre (“Pigs Eye”) Parrant. He was called Pig’s Eye because he was blind in one eye.
Most sources say Parrant was a French Canadian from Sault Ste Marie, Mich., who arrived in Mendota, the area around Fort Snelling in 1832. He worked as a fur trapper, but as he grew older he trapped less and began to distill and sell bootleg liquor from his shanty in the squatter’s colony. He sold to other settlers, to soldiers and to the Native Americans.
In 1838 the settlers were forced to move because they were putting too great a strain on the resources of the fort. They moved across the River, and a ferry took passengers back and forth from the east to the west bank. Parrant built a shanty and opened his house to sell his homemade liquor. His was, as far as we know, the first business in St. Paul and, probably, the first business in Minnesota.
Commercial activity could be said to have begun in Minnesota by the business of Pierre “Pig’s Eye” Parrant selling homemade liquor in Highland Village.
Eventually, the fort moved the settlers farther away to land north of Randolph and closer to downtown St. Paul. Parrant set up his saloon outside of Fountain Cave. It could be said that St. Paul began its life as an urban destination as a suburb of Highland Village.
Some historians have been ashamed for the honor of St. Paul when they have to record these humble origins.
J. Fletcher Williams, in his 1876 history, lamented:
“Such was the man on whom Fortune, with that blind fatuity that seems to characterize the jade, thrust the honor of being the founder of our good city! Our pride almost revolts at the chronicling of such a humiliation, and leads us to wish that it were on one worthier and nobler that such a distinction had fallen. But history is inexorable, and we must record facts as they are.”
But times have changed and, today, there is a popular local micro brew called Pig’s Eye to honor the man who first brought bottled cheer to his community.
