A French priest named Lucien Galtier was the first Roman Catholic to build a chapel at Fort Snelling in 1840. The following year, he relocated across the Mississippi River and named the fledging settlement after Saint Paul the Apostle. About sixty years later, Archbishop John Ireland commissioned Emmanuel Louis Masqueray to design a grand cathedral to be placed on top of St. Anthony Hill overlooking the city. Construction was completed in 1915, one year after the archdiocese’s co-cathedral in Minneapolis – the Basilica of St. Mary – was finished by the same architect. The Cathedral of Saint Paul is one of the largest churches in the United States.
