Ironically, what is now District 15 contained Ramsey County's first would be permanent settlements, but was one of the last residential areas in the City to be densely populated. This quirk resulted from conditions relating to Fort Snelling and its military reservation. Fort Snelling was established in 1819. Colonel Henry Leavenworth, its early commander, brought with him from Prairie du Chien Jean Baptiste Faribault, a Metis trader who occupied Pike Island with his family from 1822 to 1826 in the first, short-lived, attempted settlement in Ramsey County. A number of Swiss families from the Selkirk Colony settled around Fort Snelling and at least six of them moved across the river to near the present intersection of Elsie Land and Ford Parkway in Highland Park. This group, which included the legendary Pierre (Pig's Eye) Parrant, was expelled in 1840 when the fort's commander expanded the reservation's boundary north to present day Marshall Avenue and east to the vicinity of what is now known as Seven Corners, totally engulfing the Highland area. Historian Edward Neill states that nevertheless some French families continued to live in the area and a ferry operator lived in a home along the Mississippi River opposite the fort.

The 1849 survey of the reservation land was an impetus for settlement. In 1850, Irish immigrant William Davern made an unofficial claim on one hundred and sixty acres south of current day Montreal Avenue and north of the river bluffs between Snelling and Fairview Avenues. Davern's imposing Italianate style wood farmhouse, circa 1862, still stands at 1173 S. Davern Street. Another early claimant for land in the area whose house is also standing, though in much altered form, was Frederick Rudolph Knapheide. Knapheide and his wife Catherine Wilhelmina acquired a one hundred and twenty-four-acre tract of land and built the house at 2064 Randolph Avenue in 1857.

Davern was among the first to organize schools in Reserve Township, as the area became known in 1858 when Ramsey County was divided into six townships at the time Minnesota became a state. The first school was built at Randolph and Snelling in 1860 and was known as Webster School No. 9. It was replaced in 1870-71 by the limestone Mattocks School that has since been moved to the grounds of the Highland Park High School. The population of the area grew very slowly during the early years - it increased from two hundred and forty-nine to only four hundred and ninety in 1880. Although Fort Road between Fort Snelling and downtown St. Paul was completed in 1859, no bridge spanning the river between Fort Snelling and Reserve Township was built until 1880. A small resort hotel trade was gradually established along the riverbanks across from the Fort and flourished until the turn of the century. Among the early industries in the area was the Union stockyards, established in 1875, near the present sites of the Shell Oil tank field and the path of Interstate 35E.

Reserve Township was annexed by the city of St. Paul in 1887. Shortly thereafter, in 1891, streetcar tracks were laid from Tuscarora to the river along West Seventh Street and from West Seventh Street along Randolph to the river. The projected 1890's boom in the area never occurred, largely because of the Panic of 1893.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century Edgecumbe Road was graded from south of Summit Avenue to Mississippi River Boulevard and it became the center of a fashionable residential area. A handful of houses were built along Mississippi River Boulevard during this period, including the house at 1590 S. Mississippi River Boulevard, built in 1906, the site of an elegant prohibition era speakeasy known as the Hollyhocks Inn. A few houses were also built near Fort Road/West Seventh Street and the Mississippi River. One of the more intact such places is the tiny 1 ½ story gabled roof house at 1856 Graham Avenue built in 1908. During this same period Derham Hall and the College of St. Catherine on Randolph Avenue at Cleveland Avenue were established. Many of these building were constructed between 1904 and World War I from designs by John H. Wheeler. The Tudor inspired St. Paul Academy at 1712 Randolph was constructed in 1916 while Cretin High School at 555 S. Hamline was built in 1927 in an adaptation of the Collegiate Gothic style.

Highland Park grew tremendously beginning in the 1920's. In 1923 streetcar tracks were laid on Cleveland Avenue to Ford Parkway and down Ford Parkway to the river. The Ford Motor Company assembly plant began operation at 966 S. Mississippi River Boulevard in 1926, providing jobs for many area residents. The following year the Highland Ford Parkway Bridge was completed, and the Highland Park Reservoir was planned. The water tower was constructed in 1929. Several housing developments were planned and the Highland Park Pavilion, now the golf club, was built at 103 Montreal in 1929. Other amenities such as the pedestrian bridge over Montreal Avenue in Highland Park lured residents to the area.

During the Depression a number of new houses were built between Randolph Avenue and Ford Parkway along Edgecumbe Road. The sophisticated Art Deco style Horace Mann School at 2001 W. Eleanor Avenue was constructed in 1930-31. Hidden Falls Park was completed in 1932. The Highland pool, built by the Works Progress Administration, opened in 1936.

Highland Village Shopping Center and Highland Village apartment complex southwest of the intersection of Cleveland Avenue and Ford Parkway both opened in 1939. Among the most distinguished buildings from this period are the wonderful Streamlined Moderne style Highland Theater at 760 S. Cleveland Avenue, 1939, and the daring Streamlined Moderne style house at 1775 Hillcrest Avenue also built in 1939 and one of few houses Streamlined Moderne homes built in the city. Less innovative architecturally but of historical interest to the community is the contemporary Edyth Bush Little Theater built in the Tudor Revival style at 690 S. Cleveland Avenue in 1940.

Following World War II the population of Highland increased tremendously, many new houses and apartment buildings were constructed, the Highland Village Shopping Center was expanded and the Sibley Plaza Shopping Center on West Seventh Street was erected. Voter approval allocated funding for Shepherd Road in 1953 and the highway, completed in 1966, provides downtown St. Paul with easy access to the Twin Cities airport, via Highland Park. Shepherd Road soon became a favored spot for light industry, and more recently for condominium developments

Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between the mid-fifth century and the mid-twelfth century. It is a West Germanic language and therefore is similar to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. It is also related to Old Norse and, by extension, to modern Icelandic.

Old English was not static, and its usage covered a period of approximately 700 years – from the Anglo-Saxon migrations that created England in the fifth century to some time after the Norman invasion of 1066, when the language underwent a major and dramatic transition. During this early period it assimilated some aspects of the languages with which it came in contact, such as the Celtic languages and the two dialects of Old Norse from the invading Vikings, who were occupying and controlling the Danelaw in northern and eastern England

Germanic origins

The most important force on shaping Old English was its Germanic heritage. The vocabulary, sentence structure and grammar is shared with its sister languages in continental Europe. Some of these features were specific to the West Germanic language family to which Old English belongs, while some other features were inherited from the Proto-Germanic language from which all Germanic languages are believed to have been derived.

Like other West Germanic languages of the period, Old English was fully inflected with five grammatical cases, which had dual plural forms for referring to groups of two objects, in addition to the usual singular and plural forms. It also assigned gender to all nouns, also to those that describe inanimate objects: for example, sēo sunne (the Sun) was feminine, while se mōna (the Moon) was masculine (cf. modern German die Sonne vs. der Mond).

Latin influence

A large percentage of the educated and literate population (monks, clerics, etc.) were competent in Latin, which was the lingua franca of Europe at the time. It is sometimes possible to give approximate dates for the entry of individual Latin words into Old English based on which patterns of linguistic change they have undergone. There were at least three notable periods of Latin influence. The first occurred before the ancestral Saxons left continental Europe for England. The second began when the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity and Latin-speaking priests became widespread. The third and largest single transfer of Latin-based words occurred following the Norman invasion of 1066, after which an enormous number of Norman words entered the language. Most of these Oïl language words were themselves derived ultimately from classical Latin, although a notable stock of Norse words were introduced, or re-introduced in Norman form. The Norman Conquest approximately marks the end of Old English and the advent of Middle English.

The language was further altered by the transition away from the runic alphabet (also known as futhorc or fuþorc) to the Latin alphabet, which was also a significant factor in the developmental pressures brought to bear on the language. Old English words were spelt as they were pronounced; the "silent" letters in many Modern English words, such as the "k" in "knight", were in fact pronounced in Old English. For example, the 'hard-c' sound in cniht, the Old English equivalent of 'knight', was pronounced. Another side-effect of spelling words phonetically was that spelling was extremely variable – the spelling of a word would reflect differences in the phonetics of the writer's regional dialect, and also idiosyncratic spelling choices which varied from author to author, and even from work to work by the same author. Thus, for example, the word "and" could be spelt either and or ond.

Old English spelling can therefore be regarded as even more jumbled than modern English spelling, although it can at least claim to reflect some existing pronunciation, while modern English in many cases cannot. Most present day students of Old English learn the language using normalised versions and are only introduced to variant spellings after they have mastered the basics of the language.

Viking Influence

The second major source of loanwords to Old English were the Scandinavian words introduced during the Viking invasions of the ninth and tenth centuries. In addition to a great many place names, these consist mainly of items of basic vocabulary, and words concerned with particular administrative aspects of the Danelaw (that is, the area of land under Viking control, which included extensive holdings all along the eastern coast of England and Scotland). The Vikings spoke Old Norse, a language related to Old English in that both derived from the same ancestral Proto-Germanic language. It is very common for the intermixing of speakers of different dialects, such as those that occur during times of political unrest, to result in a mixed language, and one theory holds that exactly such a mixture of Old Norse and Old English helped accelerate the decline of case endings in Old English. Apparent confirmation of this is the fact that simplification of the case endings occurred earliest in the North and latest in the Southwest, the area farthest away from Viking influence. Regardless of the truth of this theory, the influence of Old Norse on the English language has been profound: responsible for such basic vocabulary items as sky, leg and the modern pronoun they

Celtic influence

It has traditionally been maintained that the influence of Celtic on English has been small, citing the small number of Celtic loanwords taken into the language. The number of Celtic loanwords is of a remarkably lower order than either Latin or Scandinavian.

Since the 1980s, a growing number of authors, including Hildegard Tristram, have argued that the effects of Celtic language contact have historically been underplayed. In recent years Celtic etymologies have been proposed for an increasing number of English dialect words. Tristram, Theo Vennemann and others have argued that distinctive Celtic traits are clearly discernable in English in the area of syntax.

Dialects

To further complicate matters, Old English had many dialects. The four main dialect forms of Old English were Mercian, Northumbrian (known collectively as Anglian), Kentish, and West Saxon. Each of these dialects was associated with an independent kingdom on the island. Of these, all of Northumbria and most of Mercia were overrun by the Vikings during the 9th century. The portion of Mercia and all of Kent that were successfully defended were then integrated into Wessex.

After the process of unification of the diverse Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in 878 by Alfred the Great, there is a marked decline in the importance of regional dialects. This is not because they stopped existing; regional dialects continued even after that time to this day, as evidenced both by the existence of middle and modern English dialects later on, and by common sense – people do not spontaneously develop new accents when there is a sudden change of political power.

However, the bulk of the surviving documents from the Anglo-Saxon period are written in the dialect of Wessex, Alfred's kingdom. It seems likely that with consolidation of power, it became necessary to standardise the language of government to reduce the difficulty of administering the more remote areas of the kingdom. As a result, paperwork was written in the West Saxon dialect. Not only this, but Alfred was passionate about the spread of the vernacular and brought many scribes to his region from Mercia in order that previously unwritten texts be recorded. The Church was likewise affected, especially since Alfred initiated an ambitious programme to translate religious materials into English. In order to retain his patronage and ensure the widest circulation of the translated materials, the monks and priests engaged in the programme worked in his dialect. Alfred himself seems to have translated books out of Latin and into English, notably Pope Gregory I's treatise on administration, "Pastoral Care".

Due at least partially to the centralisation of power and to the Viking invasions, there is little or no written evidence for the development of non-Wessex dialects after Alfred's unification.