Fort Snelling State Park

Fort Snelling State Park sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers in Saint Paul, below the historic Fort Snelling, built in the 1820s as one of the first major U.S. military and settlement outposts in the region. Enslaved people Dred and Harriet Scott lived at the fort in the 1830s, a period later central to their Supreme Court case challenging their enslavement. In 1862 and 1863, the area below the fort was the site of an internment camp where the U.S. military held thousands of Dakota people following the U.S.-Dakota War. Today the state park's trails and wetlands sit at this historically significant river confluence, with the restored fort itself managed separately nearby.