The area was first developed for worker housing to support the U.S. Steel plant known as the Duluth Works.

Originally named "Model City" during its designing phase in 1913 and renamed in honor of U.S. Steel's founder J. P. Morgan in June 1914, the town of Morgan Park was built and run by the U.S. Steel Corporation until 1933, when it was all deeded to the City of Duluth.

At the time of its completion, Morgan Park stood as one of the crowning achievements of company town conception.

The Morgan Park Company served as a kind of private community government, responsible for trash pickup, lawn and house care, police and fire protection, health care (until the hospital closed in the 1920s), and snow removal.

If they failed to do so, the Morgan Park Company would do the work and deduct the costs from the employee's paycheck.

Many speculators thought that Duluth would become a massive manufacturing center, second only to Pittsburgh or Chicago, but these ambitions never came close to being realized.

This was part of a restructuring effort by the parent company to deal with the Great Depression and associated market problems.

(At this point forward, the steel plant was known simply within the Corporation and the market as USS Duluth Works.)

It was used in promotions in the Twin Ports area to entice consumers to "Look for the missing fourth barb" on the nail to see if it was made at Duluth Works.

The dumping of artificially low-priced foreign steel in the United States was partly to blame, but the Duluth Works and many other plants had not been modernized with the Basic Oxygen Furnaces (BOF) to replace its outdated open hearth technology.

In June 1970 the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency gave U.S. Steel three years to conduct a study of its harmful emissions at the Duluth Works and a two-year follow-up window to implement corrective actions.

The land occupied by the former plant and the surrounding area was polluted after almost 70 years of heavy industry.

Today the land of the former steel and cement plants sit primarily vacant, a brownfield available for development.

The Duluth company Ikonics Corporation, in April 2008, has expressed intent to build a warehouse facility on the former cement plant site.

(Directions following those of Duluth's general street grid system, not actual geographical coordinates)