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St. Paul, MN → Minneapolis, MN → Owatonna, MN 108.0 mi (173.8 km) |
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Snow’s flying, everyone!
I never in a million years thought I’d be flying into Minnesota in February, but the forecast looked super reasonable! So, before I set off for my next two national parks, I’m exploring the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul!
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St. Paul is, of course, the capital of Minnesota and home to the capitol building (my 45th), where they were setting up for field trips and Lunar New Year celebrations amid sparkling snowflakes! Like many capitol buildings, this one is a third draft, constructed after the last one burned down! This rendition was the work of Cass Gilbert, who also designed the West Virginia capitol! He based the dome on the one at St. Peter’s Basilica, and with that in mind, this is the second largest, self-supported, marble dome in the whole world!
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The grounds are home to a very cool monument called the Story Stones. It was constructed in 2015 out of 87 boulders, one for each Minnesota county, organized into nine northern hemisphere constellations! It’s the work of landscape architect, Ted Lee, and it’s unlike any other military memorial I’ve ever seen. In fact, it is the first of its kind in the country, paying tribute to the military families!
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The stories on these stones are excerpts from letters written home by servicemen abroad, spanning from World War II to Iraq and Afghanistan. Some talk of a small world, like having someone recognize their Red Bull patch across the world or sharing a unit with folks of different religions. Others talk of hardships, of missing folks and being overjoyed to hear from them!
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Just reading some of these story stones made me miss my Mom, who is also across an ocean and whom I haven’t seen in two years! Come to think of it, I haven’t seen either of my brothers in at least three years! I’ve been buckling down in my adventures so much that I haven’t paid them a visit in a while. I should change that!
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But I can’t change that now. I’m already on an adventure, and I’m movin’ through the chill! Next up on the Twin City tour was the Cathedral of St. Paul! Now, you may be wondering how this city came to be named for the converted tax collector of Tarsus, in what is now Turkey! Well, Catholicism has been preached here since the arrival of Father Louis Hennepin in 1680, but the first settlement here was called Pig’s Eye! Fast forward almost 200 years, and it was a different French priest, Father Lucien Galtier, who renamed the town and built its first log chapel in honor of St. Paul. The name stuck, and in 1907, the first cornerstone went down on this Nationally Registered, Beaux-Arts cathedral, which took 51 years to build! The pope was so impressed that he gifted the cathedral a stone from the tomb of St. Paul and declared a pilgrimage to this cathedral had the same spiritual benefit as a visit to the tomb of the saint itself!
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At the time St. Paul was writing his letters, this area was home to many different Native tribes, like the ancestors of the Dakota! This entire valley was once covered by the continent’s largest river, fed by receding glaciers that have covered the entire state at least four times in the last million years! Today, Minnesota is still home to the headwaters of North America’s longest river, the Mississippi, though that’s much farther north than I’ll be traveling today. Where the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers join is called Maka Cokaya Kin, or Center of the Earth, in the Dakota Language. Unlike the Lakota, whose origin stories tell of the Pte Oyate (Buffalo Nation), emerging from a cave, the Dakota tell of how the spirits of the first people fell to this precise spot from the Wicahpi Oyate, or Star Nation!
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For that reason, this is a sacred place to not just the Dakota but also the Ioway and Ho-Chunk! They buried their ancestors in mounds all along these White Cliffs overlooking the Center of the World, high enough to be as spiritually connected to the sky as possible. Today, only six mounds have survived years of desecration and flattening by farmers, excavations, and municipal projects. Here at Indian Mounds Regional Park, their stories are told in both English and in the revitalized writing style of the Dakota and Lakota!
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From here, I crossed the Center of the World from one Twin City to the next. If the name Minnesota Vikings sounds familiar, it’s because between 1850 and 1930, Sweden was running out of land for folks to farm, and a quarter of a million Swedish folks went to find some of their own in Minnesota! One of their descendants, H. David Dalquist, founded Nordic Ware in 1948 to produce Scandinavian baking supplies, but he also invented the bundt cake pan and some of the plastics that go into microwave-safe cookware! The tower outside the Nordic Ware factory is also significant, as it’s the world’s first known cylindrical concrete grain elevator! Designed by Frank Peavey and Charles Haglin, this fireproof structure revolutionized grain storage and became the standard for farmers across the entire country!
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The factory was right next to Lilac Park, formerly St. Louis Park Roadside Park, which was built in 1939 by the Works Progress Administration (WPA)! This park was one of seven meant to decorate Highway 100, a belt line designed by Carl Graeser to act like the German Autobahn and skirt the main traffic of Minneapolis! With the help of the Golden Valley Garden Club, the entire stretch of highway was lined with lilacs, Minneapolis’ answer to Washington, DC’s cherry blossoms! There were no lilacs blooming in this park today, but it was home to one of the last surviving beehive fireplaces that used to be common along this stretch of road!
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Some of Minneapolis’ history is less pastoral, though, and much more recent. Back in 2020, my neighborhood saw all kinds of chaos in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, and it just so happens that the event went down right here in Minneapolis. It was a place I knew I had to see, and boy, was it even heavier than I’d ever expected.
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The square where police choked George Floyd to death on May 25, 2020 was still very raw. The sidewalk in front of what was Cup Foods, where he took his last breath, now called Unity Foods, was still completely barricaded off, but filled with flowers and teddy bears in his memory. It’s the first stage of the George Floyd Global Memorial. But the feeling here was unlike any I’d felt in all my years of adventuring to sad places. It still felt raw. It still felt sad and angry. It smelled of burning.
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In some ways, this square is both a monument to a moment and a platform for building a new foundation for the community. At the burnt out Speedway gas station across from Unity Foods, there were posted 24 goals for the square and beyond, some of which are already in practice! Out-of-use bus stations are now book and clothing donation hubs, while an organization called 612 MASH provides medical services for anyone in the square who needs them. The wound here was very deep, but there are definitely signs of healing.
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Love seems to be what will rebuild George Floyd Square, and LOVE was what greeted me at my next destination in Minneapolis: the Walker Center Sculpture Garden! This is the most famous sculpture by Robert Indiana, which saw its first installation in 1970 in Indianapolis but now has versions all across the globe, including London, New York, and Tokyo!
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Then there was the big blue Cock of German artist, Katharina Frisch, designed to be in all ways a normal rooster, except that it’s 20 feet tall and ultramarine blue! Created in 2013, like LOVE, it has multiple incarnations at both the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and at Trafalgar Square in London!
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But the most famous work in the garden is to be found nowhere else! This, of course, is Spoonbridge and Cherry, designed by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen! It’s not only the centerpiece of the sculpture garden, but it’s also widely considered the symbol of Minneapolis! It was originally supposed to be a Viking ship (remember the Swedes?) but became a spoon because Mr. Oldenburg had a kitschy spoon he adored and used as a symbol! It was built in two different shipyards—in Boothbay, Maine and in Bristol, Rhode Island—finished in New Haven, Connecticut, then set here on May 9, 1988 to great acclaim!
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My day in the Twin Cities was quickly running out of light, and there were still a few spots I wanted to see, like the Pillsbury A Mill, once the largest and most advanced flour mill in the whole world! Pillsbury was a Minnesota original, founded by Charles Alfred Pillsbury and his uncle John S. Pillsbury in 1869, and the two of them opened up five mills here on the banks of the upper Mississippi! To get their ground grain where it needed to go, they funded the construction of a railroad network all across Minnesota!
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Construction on this mill started in 1880 under the guidance of LeRoy S. Buffington, and when it opened, it blew the top off grain production! That’s because there were seven specialized floors managing grinding, sifting, packing, and storage, so rather than churn out a respectable 500 barrels of grain a day, the A Mill started with 5,000 barrels a day and maxed out at over 17,000 a day! By 2003, the mill had ceased production, and just like in the Blackstone River Valley, the mill was converted into apartments!
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And just like that, the light was starting to fade. I took my last looks out over the mighty Mississippi, spanned by the historic Stone Arch Bridge! The only stone bridge over the Mississippi River, it was built in 1883 as a way for the Great Northern Railroad to bring passenger trains into Minneapolis! When train travel declined in the 1970s, the railroad offered to sell the bridge to the city of Minneapolis, but it was Hennepin County that actually took them up on the offer. They originally wanted to turn it into a light rail bridge, but that plan fell through. Today, it’s a pedestrian bridge connecting two fine parks across the river that once covered all of Minnesota and continues to flow southward, as it may for many centuries to come!
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And speaking of flowing southward, that’s just what I had to do. My hotel was about an hour south in Owatonna, because I have some long drives in the next two days! There are two national park sites forming a triangle south of the Twin Cities, and over the next two days, I plan to schlep on out to both of them over the next few days, so I better rest up!
See you Owa-tomorrow!
More 2024 Adventures |
Total Ground Covered: 108.0 mi (173.8 km) |
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