Sartell is a city in Benton and Stearns Counties in the U.S. state of Minnesota that straddles the Mississippi River.

Greysolon du Luht ("Duluth") visited the large Mdewakantonwan village Izatys on Mille Lacs Lake in 1679.

The area later named Sartell was an intertribal no man's land when French fur traders and British geographers first descended the Mississippi River from the Anishinaabe north (Jean-Baptiste Perrault 1789,[9] David Thompson 1798), and American explorers ascended the river from the Sioux south (Zebulon Pike 1805, Lewis Cass 1820, Henry Schoolcraft 1832, Joseph Nicollet 1836).

[10] In 1846, 1,300 Ho-Chunk people were moved to the Sartell area,[11] followed by the Chippewa/Anishinaabe sale of the area north of the Watab River and west of the Mississippi to the U.S.[12] In 1848, more members of the Ho-Chunk/Winnebago tribe (related Dakotan speakers) were moved by order of the U.S. government to the mouth of the Watab Creek, now called the Long Prairie reservation,[13][14] to serve as a human buffer between the warring Dakota and Anishinaabe.

[15] Unhappy living between two warring tribes, the Ho-Chunk stayed less than five years, moving again in 1853 to more peaceful territory 50 miles south on the Mississippi.

Sartell got its start as a small American town on the Mississippi River with lumber and a paper company as its main industries.

The city's present site was originally called "The Third Rapids", as it was the third set of rough waters that French fur traders encountered as they traveled north from Saint Anthony Falls in Minneapolis.

One of the first white people to settle in the fledgling town was Joseph B. Sartell, who arrived in 1854 and worked as a millwright at a local sawmill.

[17] In 1877, he opened a flour mill at the nearby Watab River, and in 1884 he started Sartell Brothers Lumber Company with his sons.

The village continued to grow slowly, developing a number of businesses and a downtown on the east side of the Mississippi along U.S. Highway 10.

The city also hosts a number of small businesses, including gas stations, restaurants, grocery stores, and salons.

More recently the city has begun to urbanize, adding larger chain businesses in a newly developed area eventually to be a new downtown.

Sartell's mayor is Ryan Fitzthum, and the council members are Jill Smith, Alex Lewandowski, Tim Elness, and Jeff Kolb.

They possess the authority to pass and enforce ordinances, establish public and administrative policies, create advisory boards and commissions, and manage the city's financial operations, including preparing a budget, auditing expenditures, and transacting other city business as required by law.

[2] City recreational facilities include 24 parks, miles of paved walking paths, playgrounds, a bike lane, tennis courts, baseball and soccer fields, ice rinks, a golf course and a wading pool.

[20][21] The Sartell family was largely Presbyterian, and helped organize the first church in the town, Riverside Presbyterian, on the west bank of the Mississippi River about one mile north of the town's (then) sole stop sign, to serve the Sunday interests of local Protestants.

Saint Francis Xavier Church, Roman Catholic, was founded in 1948, named after Francis Xavier Pierz, a Slovenian missionary to Native Americans in the area, and largely responsible for attracting the large population of Slovenian, Polish, Bohemian, Slovakian and especially German farmers to the area.

Cloud Metro Bus service runs to destinations in Sartell and neighboring Sauk Rapids.

The dams along the Mississippi River and the waterway's relative shallowness render it useless for anything more than recreational watercraft traffic.

[27] Most of Sartell's Benton County sections are in Sauk Rapids-Rice Public Schools, with the rest in the Sartell-St. Stephen district.