Explore Minnesota | Field 2 Field

July 15, 2023

Exploring Tangletown and the Washburn Water Tower

Exploring never gets old for me. It was Saturday afternoon and time to get out of the house. Making my way through the smoke from Canada’s wildfires and the really strange streets of the Tangletown neighborhood in Minneapolis, it was time to find the Washburn Water Tower.

The first observation was Tangletown is the right name for that neighborhood. Whoever put those streets together maybe had one too many drinks with dinner. Nonetheless, it was time to find the tower, and for a good reason.

It looked like a structure you’d see somewhere near a castle in any one of the Lord of the Rings movies. But let’s delve into a bit of history first.

The 110-foot concrete cylinder was constructed in 1932 and sits at the top of a hill in Tangletown. A book titled “Secret Twin Cities, a Guide to the Weird, Wonderful, and Obscure” was the perfect exploring manual. It points out that if you aren’t within a block of the structure, you’ll never see the tower because it’s hidden by a combo of dense residential areas and tall trees.

Look at how intricate that carving is! (Photo by Chad Smith)

The reason for preserving the old structure was the intricate details builders put into constructing the tower, which is no longer used to supply water. Encircling the top of the tower are eight-foot tall, five-ton eagles with spread wings that look ready for takeoff.

A bit further down the cylinder, it looks like knights are standing guard outside the walls of a castle. Closer to the base are 18-foot tall, eight-ton “guardians of health” holding a perpetual vigil with swords. At a time when Minnesota was in the middle of a deadly typhoid outbreak, the guardians were symbolic protectors of a clean water supply.

The tower had a capacity of 1.35 million gallons of water, which it faithfully supplied to the neighborhood until the 1990s. Three men from the neighborhood designed and engineered the structure John Daniels was the sculptor, William Hewitt was the project engineer, and Harry Wild Jones was the lead architect.

Get out and get to exploring. The massive medieval tower is located at 401 Prospect Avenue in Minneapolis, and there’s no charge to get up close and personal with the “tower guards.”

“The Eagles have landed!” (In my best Merry and Pippin voice from LOTR!

April 10, 2022April 10, 2022

Anoka’s abandoned amphitheater

An abandoned amphitheater? Who could resist that?!

Anoka was my next stop on the exploration schedule to check out an old, abandoned amphitheater. With a hat tip to Brendon Maness for the tip, Derrick and I jumped in the car for a quick drive north on 169 and literally almost ran into the amphitheater as it’s a sidewalk away from 169 itself. Bet the traffic noise made for an interesting background to the entertainment folks put on there, back in the day?

My first impression of the amphitheater was an obvious one: this thing has been around a LONG time. The structure was put together back in 1914 on the banks of the Rum River in Anoka. The really interesting part to me is its name: the Windego Park Auditorium and Open-Air Theater. At first, I thought it was Wendigo. Do you know what a Wendigo is? I bet you do if you’re a monster movie buff like me.

The abandoned amphitheater in Anoka, Minnesota, was first built in 1914. (photo by Chad Smith)

The old theater is currently listed in the National Register of Historic Places and had to be a great place to watch a program back then. The location on the bank of the Rum River is beautiful.

Anoka’s citizens back then had a notable interest in outdoor entertainment and recreation. Thaddeus P. Giddings, a promoter of music education who’d been organizing community singalongs in the summer of 1913, took over organizing the programs and entertainment at the amphitheater.

Another gentleman named William Gray Purcell designed the amphitheater, and I thought he did a bang-up job. The stage sits on the flat part of the riverbank, and, as you can see in the pictures, the seats are on the sloping hillside. It had room for an audience of up to 1,600 people in its heyday.

At one time, the seating was covered by a colorful retractable awning system designed to protect patrons from the weather. That had to be a must-have during summertime storms and heat waves, am I right? A curved back wall at one time included a box office, entrance doors, and a projection booth, but that part no longer stands.

The orchestra pit was located at the foot of the bleachers. The stage area was off to the left and was nothing more than a flat part of the riverbank. (Photo by Chad Smith)

The theater was used for amateur plays, historical pageants, and other local community musical or meeting events. However, the theater would only thrive as long as Giddings was on hand. Giddings began spending summers at his music camp located in Michigan, and the amphitheater fell into disuse, with the exception of an occasional gathering.

In 1979, Anne Bronken, a University of Minnesota Landscape Architecture Department student, designed a plan to restore the amphitheater. Community organizers patched the concrete and did some cleanup work. A restoration planned as recently as 2010 didn’t happen. Today, the amphitheater has only its seating and orchestra pit left standing, and both are in a deteriorated state.

The view from the amphitheater. The Rum River is in the background and had to make for a fantastic setting to watch a play or concert. (Photo by Chad Smith)

Here’s a link to my Facebook photo album

April 17, 2021April 17, 2021

Quarry Park offers great exploring and history

My complete photo album is here.

Quarry Park and Nature Preserve was the latest stop on the 2021 “Explore Minnesota Before I Run Out of Gas Tour.” I’m not sure if that name is referring to my car or my body because, at my age, I run out of gas a little quicker than I used to, but I digress. I jumped in the car early on a Saturday morning because I could no longer sleep, so what was the point in trying?

Here are some of the highlights from the Quarry Park and Nature Preserve exploration. It’s a great place to do some hiking and picture taking! (Video by Chad Smith)

I spent a couple of hours looking for some abandoned places to explore, but that idea turned out to be a dud. I found myself in Waite Park, Minnesota, up by St. Cloud, and needing a pit stop. I AM 50, after all. Coming into town, I happened to glance to the right and noticed what looked like a couple of large gravel pits. Okay, they weren’t gravel, they were granite, but it’s the only thing I had stored in my brain to compare them to.

Quarry Park and Nature Preserve is the full name of the place and covers nearly 700 acres of Stearns County land. At one time, it was an actual granite quarry known as the “Hundred Acres Quarry.” Granite is formed by intense heat within the earth and was the “foundation” of a major industry.

The history page on the park’s website points out that the first granite quarry in Central Minnesota was opened in 1863 by two Scotsmen. In the 130 years that followed, central Minnesota granite became an international commodity gracing several buildings located as far away as Singapore.

Roughly a century ago, a type of stone known as Saint Cloud Red Granite was quarried from land which is now part of the park. The Landmark Center and the James J. Hill House in St. Paul, Minnesota, both contain Saint Cloud Red Granite in their structures.

One thing I can’t figure out is whether or not these quarries are filled with stagnant water? I know there’s fish stocked in there (saw the ripples) so they’d need fresh water circulating through there, right? (Photo by Chad Smith)

Though private ownership of the land by local quarry companies continued through 1992, quarrying operations in the present park area quit for good in the mid-1950s. Companies operating quarries on the site including Holes Brothers, Delano Granite, Melrose Granite Company, Empire Quarry Company, and C.L. Atwood.

Over the years, the land gradually reverted to a more natural state. What did Poison Ivy tell Batman in the Arkham Knight game? “Nature always wins.” In 1992, Stearns County bought the site from the Cold Spring Granite Company and added the land to its County Park System. The park opened up on January 1, 1998.

I spent a solid two hours exploring the place, and I might have gotten through a third of the whole thing. You can hike there, go rock climbing, swimming, and even scuba diving in a couple of locations.

You can check out everything the park has to offer here.

Here’s the bottom of the Liberty Derrick. (Photo by Chad Smith)

April 10, 2020April 10, 2020

Mill ruins explore in Hastings, Minnesota

Mill ruins are so much fun to explore. Minnesota seems to have its share of these old buildings scattered around the state. Time to Explore Minnesota. We’ve all seen or heard the commercials from time to time, haven’t we?

Well, as I’ve unfortunately had a little more free time lately (thanks COVID-19), I’ve taken that commercial a little more to heart than I have in the past. And yes, I’m keeping socially distant. Instead of feet, my distance between me and other carbon-based lifeforms stretches for miles, okay?

After exploring an abandoned farm that didn’t have much left to it, I was off to Hastings next to see their Old Mill Park. That kind of thing is even more interesting to me after spending a couple days poking around Mill Ruins Park in the Twin Cities. While this one wasn’t as big as Mill Ruins Park, the history was just as interesting.

It turns out this is all that’s left of the old Ramsey Mill in Hastings, built back in the mid-1800s. My first thought as I was walking down the path to the old structures was “man they’re tall!” And I was more right than I first knew. The old mill was no less than four stories tall. Alexander Ramsey and Dr. Thomas Foster built it right next to the Vermillion River.

The big structure was called a “grist” mill. What that means is it ground cereal grains into flour and what were called “middlings.” Those are the parts that aren’t flour. Middlings are a good source of protein, fiber, phosphorus, and other nutrients. People use them to produce foods like pasta, breakfast cereals, puddings, and couscous for humans, as well as fodder for livestock and pets. How about that? You and I learned something today. I didn’t know what middlings were either.

It’s interesting that Ramsey actually sold his interest in the business in 1877 but the place still retained his name. The mill would operate for another two decades before a fire broke out in late 1894. A Wiki article says it unfortunately may have been arson. It was really too bad because the mill had just cranked up its production to 125 barrels a day, higher than it had ever done before.

The Ramsey Mill was hit by a fire in 1894. While there isn’t much of the physical structure left, there’s still a lot of history there. (Photo by Chad Smith)

I don’t actually know when it shut down officially. The oldest photo I could find online was in 1902, when folks in Hastings were already calling it the “Ramsey Mill Ruins.”

As I was leaving the Old Mill Park, I glanced off to the right and saw the most remarkable little tree that seems to be growing right out of the end of the overhang. Those trees can grow in the strangest places, can’t they?