Pine Knot News - A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news

Do you know your French? In our continuing effort to get to the bottom of the business of where the Cloquet name came from, we found this front page of the Minneapolis newspaper, Echo de L'ouest, from February of 1918. It appears that the issue is profiling the state of things in the booming lumber city eight months before the devastating fire.

The beginning of the article, using the very rudimentary French known by Pine Knot staffers, seems to describe where the name may have come from. We see a question mark, and the mention of the name Cloutier, which would indicate the theory of whether a...