Welcome to May Township
May Township was organized in 1893 out of the southern part of Marine Mills. A year later the Town Hall was built and the first supervisors were elected. Along with various road and bridge improvements, the first supervisors made an attempt to organize a village along the west shore of Lake Carnelian in hopes of developing a prosperous summer resort. One of the town’s early settlers was an English immigrant who eventually became one of the more prosperous farmers of the northwest, at one time owning 2,000 acres. It was after this man, Morgan May, the township was named.
Scenery-seeking tourists flocked to the St. Croix River from earliest days, many enjoying it from excursion steamboats. Unfortunately for its development as a resort area, the railroad did not push through May Township until 1887. The township’s popularity as a summer destination had to wait for the construction of roads suitable for automobiles. By 1910 St. Paulites were driving to summer homes on the river and lakes and pioneer farms were being sold as camping and building sites. Benjamin Sheffield, president of Big Diamond Milling, built his log home, Croixside, on the river in 1922. Dunrovin, the home of Reuben Hadrath, is now a Christian Brothers retreat. Much of the old Morgan May farm near Square Lake was developed in the 1960s by the Amherst H. Wilder and the Lee and Rose Warner Foundations to provide natural areas suitable for environmental learning
During the 1950s, expansion of the transportation network in the metropolitan area began the process of suburbanizing the township. A boom in residential development has caused the population to more than triple since 1960. At present, land in May Township is a mixture of residential use, agricultural use, and public open space.
In 1893 May Township had three general stores, four public schools, a blacksmith shop, an elevator, a feed mill, and two churches. The Minnesota census of 1905 shows the township with a population of 761. In 2005 the township had a population of about 3,000, up from 2,500 a decade before.