Tracking Down Minnesota’s “Doughnut Cities”
This does not happen in Massachusetts. There, cities and towns tile the counties and the state: they do not overlap. Minnesota is kinda different. In this state, eleven cities are completely enclosed within the limits of another city — nine in the Twin Cities Metro plus a “double doughnut” in the southeast.
The map below shows all eleven doughnut cities, and the next one zooms in on the nine pairs in the Metro. (Click on the maps to open a larger version in a new window.) The table that follows gives stats for the doughnut cities; click the column headers to re-sort the table.
I’m confident that I have found all the doughnut cities that exist in Minnesota. The confidence comes from ingesting Open Street Map data for 852 Minnesota cities and writing a computer program (in Python) to find the nested pairs in all that data. If there is interest from the technically curious I may post a followup on the Recovering Physicist blog, but the details of the process are too voluminous and obscure to go into here.

All eleven Minnesota doughnut cities. Nine are scattered around the Twin Cities Metro and two form a “double doughnut” in the southeast corner of the state. Click on the map for a larger version.
Minnesota doughnut cities
© Keith Dawson, Kinda Different, 2019
city | surrounded by | county | date estab- lished |
date incor- porated |
area, sq.mi. |
2010 popu- lation |
zip code(s) |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Centerville | Lino Lakes | Anoka | 1857 | 1910 | 2.41 | 3792 | 55038 |
Hilltop | Columbia Heights | Anoka | 1940s | 1956 | 0.12 | 744 | 55421 |
Landfall | Oakdale | Washington | 1953 | 1959 | 0.08 | 686 | 55128 |
Long Lake | Orono | Hennepin | 1855 | 1906 | 0.95 | 1768 | 55356 |
Loretto | Medina | Hennepin | 1886 | 1940 | 0.29 | 650 | 55357, 55599 |
Medicine Lake | Plymouth | Hennepin | 1888 | 1944 | 0.17 | 371 | 55441 |
Mendota | Mendota Heights | Dakota | 1805 | 1844 | 0.28 | 198 | 55150 |
Peterson | Rushford Village | Fillmore | 1870 | 1909 | 0.49 | 199 | 55962 |
Rushford | Rushford Village | Fillmore | 1854 | 1868 | 1.67 | 1731 | 55971 |
St. Bonifacius | Minnetrista | Hennepin | 1856 | 1904 | 1.07 | 2283 | 55375 |
Willernie | Mahtomedi | Washington | 1914 | 1948 | 0.13 | 507 | 55090 |
Click the column headers to re-sort the table.
Terminology
I learned the term “doughnut towns,” which I have adapted for this state as “doughnut cities,” from a prolific Wikipedia editor named Alan Sohn. He lives in New Jersey, which has 21 doughnut towns. In private correspondence Sohn cited a couple of articles that employ the term.
Wikipedia features a scattering of entries touching on the phenomenon of doughnut cities, but the information there is far from complete. In the process of this research I edited the Wikipedia entries for List of enclaves and exclaves and List of cities surrounded by another city to include all 11 city pairs identified here.
Origins
Minnesota’s doughnut “hole” cities embody a variety of historical reasons why they chose, and were able, to separate themselves administratively from their surrounding cities.
Several factors in Minnesota’s laws and constitution have allowed (or encouraged) the formation of doughnut cities. One is the lack of a definition at the state level that would forbid overlapping city boundaries. Some states have codified such a restriction, for example Massachusetts. Another factor operating in Minnesota is the relative ease of incorporating a city: that act requires only the signatures of 100 residents on a petition, followed by a majority vote of residents.
Two of our doughnut cities, Hilltop and Landfall, began life as trailer parks (and Landfall still is largely that); and in both cases the surrounding cities initially fought the separation. Several began their existence with settlement by a homogeneous group distinct from their neighbors — for example St. Bonifacius was settled by Germans (it was originally called “German Home”), and Loretto by a group of German and Dutch immigrants. Several doughnut cities represent the original village around which a larger sprawl grew in later years — Centerville is an example and Lino Lakes is the sprawl.
For later posts in this blog series I hope to visit the doughnut cities and profile their histories and current circumstances in some detail. For now I would just like to tell the story of the naming of Loretto.
Loretto in Medina, Hennepin County
Loretto was named by its original settlers for a town in Quebec, Canada now called L’Ancienne-Lorette. This town was founded in 1674 as a place of refuge for a group of native Hurons, who were fleeing a war with the Iroquois. A Jesuit missionary built a chapel for the Hurons and offered them protection. He named the area Lorette after the shrine of Loreto in Italy, which he had visited on several occasions.
By 1697 the Hurons had mostly decamped for greener pastures. At that point, according to Wikipedia, “the site became known as Vieille-Lorette (Old Loreto) or Ancienne-Lorette (Former Loreto). A new location became known as Nouvelle-Lorette (New Loreto) or Jeune-Lorette (Young Loreto), and roughly corresponds to the Loretteville of today.”
The truly interesting detail for our purposes is that now L’Ancienne-Lorette is itself part of a doughnut city pair — it is completely enclosed by the city of Quebec.
None of the sources I could find speculated on how and why those particular German and Dutch immigrants knew of a small town in French Canada, 932 nautical miles distant as the jet flies, founded almost 200 years previously, and named for an Italian shrine. Or why they thought highly enough of that Canadian sanctuary town to name their new home after it.
I’m surprised that you did not mention Brookline, an exclave of Norfolk County, Massachusetts.
I’m also surprised that none of these enclaves are in the biggest cities.
I was only considering Minnesota doughnuts. I will look into that Brookline situation though, I thought that was the kind of thing that couldn’t happen under a New England-style dispensation.
Lovely work! It is hugely fun that you and K have so thoroughly documented places to have coffee, and are now working on doughnuts (even if not the edible kind).
You seem to be continuing your tradition of “in the fourth year, have four words in the title” (if we assume that articles are not usually counted, and in this this case, treat “Doughnut Cities” as an honorary compound word). I may be stretching that, however.
Thank you Jules! Actually the blog is in its fifth (calendar) year. Begun in June 2015 and I chose to assume that the second year (and two-word titles) began in January 2016. Articles do count; and considering “doughnut city” as if it were a compound word would feel like a particularly egregious cheat. As I mused here, I may return to single words at the turn of the next calendar year.
A neighbor pointed out (on Nextdoor.com) the curious case of New Hope and Crystal, MN.
These adjacent cities have a complicated border running mostly north-south. And each city has a piece of its territory within the bounds of the other.
The small, disconnected chunk of New Hope surrounded by Crystal contains a Mexican restaurant, an auto parts store, two banks, and a few houses. It does not make an ounce of sense. The piece of Crystal enclosed within New Hope is more understandable: it encompasses a synagogue and the associated cemetery.
Perhaps we can call those two cities “mutually assured doughnuts.”
I commuted through and worked near the Crystal/New Hope border for several years but never recognized the weird geometry there. Reminds me of some of the San Jose shenanigans…
Say more about San Jose if you would, Greg. I seem to recall a little straw-like projection to the north along a roadway…?
A doughnut of a different kind: in the northeast corner of Arizona, which does not observe daylight saving time, is the Navajo Nation, which does; and entirely enclosed within the Navajo land is a Hopi reservation, which does not.
So consider this trip some time in early summer. Start in Winslow AZ at noon. Drive north on state road 87 and arrive at Seba Dalkai AZ (in Navajo country) 45 minutes later at 11:45 am. Continue north to Kykotsmovi Village in Hopi territory, arriving 38 minutes later at 1:23 pm. Continue north and pick up state 264 west, arriving 56 minutes later in Tuba City AZ at 1:19 pm, 4 minutes before you left the Hopi village. On this last leg you will have passed through another Hopi enclave. Total time changes over your 2:19 trip: 5.