Is it "St. Cloud" or "Saint Cloud"? I understand there are more pressing issues going on in the world right now, but this has been on my mind lately.

If you drive around our area you will see "St. Cloud" painted on water towers, but as you drive into town on Hwy 15 you see this sign:

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When my Apple Watch tells me the weather it spells it out as "Saint" Cloud", but Wikipedia lists it as "St. Cloud".

To dig deeper into this I did some research on the namesake of the town.

The area was open to settlers in 1851 and was named by John Wilson:

John Wilson, a Maine native with French Huguenot ancestry and an interest in Napoleon, named the settlement St. Cloud after Saint-Cloud, the Paris suburb where Napoleon had his favorite palace.

Saint-Cloud is one of France's wealthiest towns, which is kinda cool. That Saint-Cloud was named after Saint Clodoald who was born in 522 AD and was known for renouncing his royalty to become a hermit and monk.

So a deep dive didn't turn up much of an answer. It appears that our namesake contains the full spelling of "Saint" but more modern adaptations call for the abbreviated "St." which is guess is easier to paint on structures and use in business names.

Long story short, as long as you are spelling it one of those two ways, it is correct. And when it doubt just call it "The Granite City", or "Cloud Town" if you want everyone to roll their eyes at you.

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