Drive Miller Trunk Highway on any given Saturday and the town reads like a shopping list: Fleet Farm, the big box strip, the through-traffic headed toward Duluth. That's the version of Hermantown most people carry around in their head, a city of just over 10,000 people that exists mostly as the place you pass through to get somewhere else.
That version misses the actual story. Twice in the last few years, something that started small and local in Hermantown got big enough that it stopped fitting inside the town limits. One is still happening right now, this fall, in real time. You can watch it if you know where to look.
The Bowling Alley That Needed A Second Location
Skyline Social & Games sits on Miller Trunk Highway and for years it was, by its own description, mostly just a bowling alley. A renovation added duckpin lanes, axe throwing bays, and an outdoor complex of sand volleyball, cornhole, and bocce courts, and the place turned into the kind of venue that hosts company retreats, class reunions, and birthday parties on top of its year-round leagues.
Then it outgrew Hermantown. In 2025, Skyline's ownership got approval from the Apple Valley Planning Commission to build a second location in the Twin Cities suburb, inside the Orchard Place development. Construction broke ground that October, and the new complex opened this past July with 20 bowling lanes, 12 duckpin lanes, 5 axe throwing lanes, and 51,000 square feet of outdoor space built around fire pits and covered patio seating. The plans describe it as similar to their Hermantown location, just built at a larger scale from the start.
That's a Hermantown business template getting exported to the metro. The original location is still doing what made it work in the first place. Earlier this month, Skyline hosted its 5th Annual Bloody Bash on August 9, a charity event that pairs Bloody Mary samples from 10 local bars and restaurants with beer from 8 local breweries and live music from The Northwood's Band. Last year's Bloody Bash raised more than $24,000 for Never Surrender Inc., a nonprofit funding ALS research. This year's goal was to beat that number.
A Home Kitchen, A Food Truck, And A Shot At The State Fair
The second export story is smaller in footprint but arguably bigger in reach. In 2020, Amy Sirois started making flavored marshmallows in her home kitchen while working full time in recruitment for the Minnesota Air National Guard's 148th Fighter Wing. She sold them under Minnesota's Cottage Food Law, which lets home producers sell certain foods directly without a commercial kitchen license.
Five years later, The Minnesota Marshmallow has a food truck that deep-fries the marshmallows on a stick, and the product line has grown to more than 70 rotating flavors. What matters for Hermantown specifically is where the business shows up. The truck parks regularly at Fleet Farm in Hermantown on weekend mornings, and the marshmallows themselves are stocked on shelves well beyond the town: Johnson's Bakery and Bridgeman's in Duluth, Bearaboo Coffee Shop in Cloquet, Louise's Place Cafe and Moosecellaneous Gift Shop in Two Harbors, Cedar Barn in Superior, and Backroads Coffee Shop as far away as Hayward, Wisconsin. Locally, the Vintage Hideaway Marketplace in Hermantown carries them too.
Each fall, the truck rolls out seasonal flavors like Caramel Apple, Reese's Peanut Butter, and Butterbeer Vanilla Almond, timed to its yearly stops at Wisconsin's Warrens Cranberry Festival and the Bayfield Apple Festival. Last year, the business also put in an application for a spot at the 2026 Minnesota State Fair, which draws roughly 1.3 million attendees each year. Sirois had already done the math on what that could mean.
"Twenty percent of that put us at making around 780,000 marshmallows."
A business that started with one person's kitchen experiments is now scoping out three-quarter-million-unit production runs. That's the same shape as the Skyline story: something Hermantown grew got big enough to leave.
Here's what that growth looks like side by side.
| Started as | Where it is now | |
|---|---|---|
| Skyline Social & Games | A bowling alley on Miller Trunk Highway | A six-activity venue with a second location in Apple Valley, nearly matching Hermantown's layout at a larger scale |
| The Minnesota Marshmallow | Home-kitchen marshmallows sold under Minnesota's Cottage Food Law | A food truck stocked in retail spots across Duluth, Two Harbors, Superior, Cloquet, and Hayward, with an application in for the 2026 Minnesota State Fair |
The One Thing That Isn't Trying To Get Bigger
Not everything in Hermantown is scaling outward, and that's worth sitting with for a second. The Hermantown Historical Society opens its doors on the second and fourth Saturday of every month, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., and it has kept that same modest schedule for years. It isn't building a second location. It isn't applying to the State Fair. It exists to hold the town's own record of itself while everything else grows past it.
That contrast is the actual point. A place that produces businesses capable of scaling statewide and even into the Twin Cities is not the same as a place that has nothing worth keeping local. Hermantown does both at once. The Historical Society is the quiet counterweight to the food truck and the bowling-alley-turned-entertainment-complex, and all three are true about the same 10,000-person town at the same time.
What's Actually Open This Weekend
If you live in Hermantown and want to see any of this in person rather than read about it, here's where each piece currently stands:
- Fleet Farm in Hermantown hosts The Minnesota Marshmallow's food truck on a rotating weekend schedule, usually Friday and Saturday mornings.
- Skyline Social & Games runs year-round leagues in bocce, cornhole, sand volleyball, bowling, duckpin, and axe throwing, with signups open on their site for whichever season is next.
- The Vintage Hideaway Marketplace carries Minnesota Marshmallow product on the shelf if you miss the truck.
- The Hermantown Historical Society is open the second and fourth Saturday of the month, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., for anyone curious about the town's own back story.
None of this requires planning a trip. It's what's already running, this week, inside a town most people still think of as a stop on the way to somewhere bigger. The irony is that Hermantown keeps proving it's the place things get big from.
If you're already living here and thinking about what comes next for your own house, whether that's understanding what your home is worth in the current market or figuring out your options before you list, Michelle Ryan has spent years watching this town grow in exactly the ways described above. Reach out for a free home valuation or a no-pressure conversation about your next move in Hermantown.
