Talk:St. Louis County, Minnesota

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The list of townships is stil incompolete or incorrect. Some items on Orphaned Articles/CDPs and towns belong here. Lou I 11:21, 25 Jul 2004 (UTC)

How big *is* it?
_ _ A county supervisor claimed this past weekend on public radio's Whad'Ya Know? show that it was largest (not 2nd), without displaying any awareness of a competing claim. Is this a matter of land area vs total area? Did he just have a vague memory about what he'd heard others say? _ _ He also quoted two statistics: 5000 miles of roads, and 900,000 acres of tax-forfeited land managed on behalf of the state. Maybe it's worth finding a place to fit those in. --Jerzy•t 15:32 & 15:38, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

Conflicting information in the article
The article introduction says that the county is the second largest east of the Mississippi River, but the body says it is the largest. Could someone find out which is true and correct this? Thanks! 71.210.174.126 (talk) 07:19, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Definitely First, Definitely Second
The bottom line is this. Whether they are first or second depends on what people's definition of "area" is. I know that this sounds relatively simple and "obvious" on the surface (pun intended), but to some people it refers to total area under the county's jurisdiction, including water area. To others, it refers only to "land" area, the part that can actually be inhabited by people; therefore water areas do not count. To get an idea of the importance of this concept, the Census Bureau defines all ocean-fronted and lake-fronted counties to include a large part of water area, which includes large parts of the Great Lakes or jurisdiction out to a certain distance in the Atlantic, Pacific, or Arctic Oceans. Including these water areas distorts the "area" of the county, according to many people, who perceive that "area" should only include actual land area. A landlocked county can never have the advantage of including an arbitrary amount of water area to its total, so it would be fairer to exclude all water areas, according to them.

So here it is: According to the Census Bureau's 2010 official statistics, if you include all area (land and water), Saint Louis County has 6,859.503 square miles to 6,827.568 square miles for Aroostook County. However, if you exclude the official water areas, Aroostook County wins with 6,671.330 square miles to Saint Louis County's 6,247.401 square miles. This difference is entirely due to the fact that Saint Louis County (in Minnesota, the land of lakes) has 612.102 square miles of water, as opposed to Aroostook County's only 156.238 square miles.

So, the argument is not over who is first or who is second; the argument is over whether water should be counted as part of "area", remembering that to do so would tremendously distort the areas of counties bordering the oceans or the Great Lakes. Backspace (talk) 20:17, 24 March 2012 (UTC)

Duluth metro area
Why is the entirety of St Louis County considered part of the Duluth metro area? Duluth is closer to Minneapolis and St Paul than the top of the county, and most of the county is empty. Malcolmmwa (talk) 22:40, 9 December 2021 (UTC)


 * We might as well just consider Duluth to be part of the Twin Cities. It makes about as much sense. Malcolmmwa (talk) 22:43, 9 December 2021 (UTC)