Gaylord boxes in Ramsey County

Ramsey is small and dense. St. Paul, the state capital, is its core, with 3M's main campus in Maplewood and Old Dutch Foods in Roseville. The county's industry is older than most, and some of it has gone: Ford's Highland Park plant closed in 2011.

Ramsey is the county where the oldest industrial buildings sit next to the newest offices. Many of its boxes come from adhesives, sanitation chemicals and snack food, which tend to be steady, dry and predictable. If you run one of those, say how long a stack stands and whether the dock is heated.

Ramsey County at a glance

Ramsey County's page gives 552,352 people at the 2020 census over just 170 square miles, the smallest and densest of the counties here. It describes the county as a major freight rail hub on BNSF's Northern Transcon route, also served by Union Pacific and Canadian Pacific, with Amtrak's Empire Builder running daily from Union Depot.

Roads named include Interstates 35E, 35W, 94 and 694, U.S. 10, 12, 52 and 61, and Minnesota 5, 13, 36, 51, 120, 149 and 280. Saint Paul Downtown Airport has three runways used mainly for general aviation and military flights.

Highways and rail

I-94, I-35E, I-35W and I-694 meet or cross here, and the county holds the state capital.

Ramsey towns

Across Ramsey's towns the trades that show most often are printing and packaging (2), industrial and metal products (2), chemicals, lubricants and refining (1) and distribution, parcel and logistics (1). The largest towns are St. Paul, Maplewood and Roseville.

Maplewood

Population 40,142 (Census estimate, July 2024). 3M's headquarters and main campus.

3M's corporate headquarters and main campus anchor Maplewood, with 12,000 employees in the city's 2020 report, far ahead of the school district (1,829), St. John's Hospital (973), Target (550) and Cub Foods (350). 3M finished the first buildings of its central research laboratory in the area in 1955 and that the company's presence was cited as a reason for incorporation in 1957.

Roseville

Population 35,637 (Census estimate, July 2024). Old Dutch Foods is headquartered here.

Roseville is home to Old Dutch Foods headquarters, Fantasy Flight Games (described as the world's fifth-largest board game publisher), the Minnesota State Lottery, the Minnesota Departments of Education and Transportation (Metropolitan District) and one of FICO's main Midwest offices. UNIVAC designed and manufactured mainframe computers at a Roseville plant from 1961 to 2017.

White Bear Lake

International Paper runs a facility in the north of the city.

Three businesses in White Bear Lake stand out: Smarte Carte, which supplies baggage carts to airports worldwide and has its headquarters near Interstate 35E and Ramsey County Highway 96; an International Paper facility on 9th Street in the north of the city, a major global pulp and paper producer; and Magnepan, a maker of high-end audio loudspeakers next to the International Paper site.

New Brighton

The Twin Cities Ordnance Plant made ammunition here in the 1940s and employed 24,000 at its peak.

APi Group is located in New Brighton and became a Fortune 500 company in 2026, and that Andersen Corporation bought an office building there in 2026 for $9 million. In the 1940s the Twin Cities Ordinance Plant made .30 and .50 caliber ammunition, employing 24,000 at its peak, over half of them women, operated by the Federal Cartridge Corporation.

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