The Round Tower has been a symbol of Fort Snelling since its construction in 1820. Though the U.S. Army originally built it as a defensive point for the fort, the tower has served many different functions over its long history.
The Round Tower was built during the initial construction of Fort St. Anthony (later renamed Fort Snelling). It featured limestone walls over twenty-five feet high with musket slits that faced both outside and inside the fort. These could be used to defend against an enemy that breached the fort’s walls and suggest that the tower was designed as a last-ditch point of defense.
The tower’s original flat roof could accommodate mounted cannon for defense. Troops mounted a twelve-pound field-artillery piece during the U.S.–Ho-Chunk War of 1827. The fort, however, was never attacked and its cannons never fired in conflict. In the 1830s the tower’s interior was used for storage. By 1839, the fort’s flagpole had been placed on the tower’s roof.
During the Civil War, the army added a conical roof made of sheet iron to the tower for ordinance storage. Round Tower lore states that Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, founder of the Zeppelin airship company, quartered in the Round Tower at Fort Snelling during the war as a German military attaché sent to observe Union Army operations. It is said he launched his first balloon flight from the top of the Round Tower. While Zeppelin claimed to have travelled through St. Paul during this time, there is no evidence to support the connection to the Round Tower.
In 1869, a fire gutted the tower and prompted a restoration of the badly damaged building. The conical roof was removed for an open-air weather deck once again. Embrasures were added to the parapet, giving the tower a crenellated, medieval look, and the musket slits were widened into windows. Throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century, the army used the tower, at times, as a washhouse, guardhouse, prison room, and coal storage room.
In 1904, the post quartermaster covered the tower, which he was using as an office, with stucco. A public outcry over the building’s changed appearance and cracking of the stucco led him to soon remove it.
After World War I, the tower continued to be used as offices and living quarters. It was converted into a family residence by the 1930s and quartered Thomas Marcum, the post electrician whose wife ran a beauty shop there.
The Marcums moved out in 1937 when the post commandant, Brigadier General Campbell B. Hodges, decided to convert the tower into a museum of Minnesota history under the supervision of the Minnesota Historical Society. Marion Snelling Hall, the great-granddaughter of Colonel Josiah Snelling, gave her support for the renovation.
With the assistance of the Works Progress Administration, the Round Tower Museum opened on May 30, 1941. The interior walls featured a mural by Richard Haines. Its panels depicted scenes of American occupation of the region, beginning in 1805. The terrazzo floor contained an inlayed diagram of the fort as it appeared in 1840.
The museum displayed rotating exhibits, including belongings of Josiah Snelling donated by Hall. Hall gave her consent for the remains of Josiah’s daughter Elizabeth, touted as the first white child born in Minnesota, to be moved into a crypt in the wall of the museum. In 1965, Elizabeth was reinterred in the Fort Snelling Chapel.
In a ceremony on June 7, 1946, Governor Edward J. Thye removed a stone from the round tower to be sent to Australia and included in a war memorial building in Brisbane. The Australian government requested stones from each of the forty-eight states to honor American troops.
In 1956, the Minnesota Highway Department proposed building a highway through a part of the old fort site known as the lower post. The highway’s cloverleaf would have encircled the round tower, cutting off access to it. Public concern sparked a successful movement to reroute the highway and restore the lower post. A team of archeologists excavated the Round Tower in 1965 and restored it to its 1820s appearance the following year. It has since stood among the restored and reconstructed buildings of Historic Fort Snelling, run by the Minnesota Historical Society.