My 50 Favorite Minnesota Towns #20-11
The next batch of 10 revealed....
#20. Luverne (Rock County, est. pop. 4,500). Anybody who watched Ken Burns’ miniseries “The War” will recognize Luverne as one of the four communities profiled. Luverne is located along I-90 in the southwesternmost Minnesota county and is easily more connected to the culture of South Dakota than Minnesota. The landscape starts to get more South Dakota-ish as well as a tiny chunk of Rock County is the only region of Minnesota defined as the “inner coteau” soil type. I’m not entirely sure what that means, other than there are thick loess deposits, but for whatever reasons the vantage points from the freeway on both sides of Luverne are very extensive, enabling the driver to see homes and farms on either a prolonged horizon line or else a very convincing mirage of a prolonged horizon line. In my profile of Jasper, I discussed the pink quartzite rock abundant in the area (I was called out by one reader, but I don’t think “pipestone” and the pink quartzite I speak of are the same thing) and used in the construction and landscaping of that town. Several buildings in Luverne are constructed with the same unusual yet attractive rock, including the Rock County Courthouse. Heading north of Luverne on U.S. Highway 75, the Blue Mounds State Park is located near the crest of a large hill. I’ve never had the opportunity to go inside, but the park is full of the buffalo that used to roam the region before its human settlement. Rock County is a Republican stronghold, mostly due to the large percentage of Dutch evangelicals in the rural regions of the county. The city of Luverne is divided, but leans slightly Republican.
#19. Fairmont (Martin County, est. pop. 11,000). I definitely have a weakness for the southern Minnesota towns where I traveled with my dad doing vinyl repair work at car lots back in the early 1990s. Fairmont was another frequent destination, and on mornings when he was feeling particularly well-heeled, I was able to convince him to go out for breakfast at either the Perkins or Happy Chef just off the freeway. A decade later, my work at the newspaper in St. James led me to multiple interviews in Fairmont, and as was the case with my early encounters with the locals, I was struck by how friendly the people always seemed to be. At least up until lately, I’ve also been impressed by how well Fairmont has maintained its business sector given its stagnant population. The downtown area remains very nice and the string of lakes dotting the city’s south side makes for some nice lakeside drives in scenic neighborhoods. A 3M plant remains one of Fairmont’s main employers, along with a small meat processor that hosted a very high-profile visit from Paul and Linda McCartney in the early 1990s, both hyping some vegetarian dish that Linda was marketing with the company. The only major downside with Fairmont is its politics. Like most communities settled primarily by German immigrants, Fairmont is heavily Republican. Even Amy Klobuchar, who won the 2006 Senate race by 20 points statewide, only managed to eke out a one-point margin of victory in Fairmont. Republican State Representative Bob Gunther is from Fairmont and his district included St. James where I worked at the newspaper, so I got regular visits from him. Gunther, who ran a small grocery store in town and often gets some acclaim from Democrats for bipartisan overtures, always seemed to enjoy talking politics with me even though we didn’t see eye to eye. He was kind of a smartass at times, but I generally liked the guy. I definitely felt bad when I drove through town last year and discovered his store has apparently gone out of business.
#18. Grand Marais (Cook County, est. pop. 1,200). As scenic as it is, Cook County, at the tip of northeastern Minnesota’s Arrowhead region, is a frustrating area for a road-tripper, at least it is for this road-tripper. Particularly for someone who begins the day way down by the Albert Lea area, by the time you get to Grand Marais and Grand Portage and then backtrack on Highway 61, the only major highway in the entire county (!!), your day is pretty much over. It’s only when one is driving the 175-mile voyage northeast of Duluth that he or she can appreciate that the Grand Marais area is almost as far east as Madison, Wisconsin. Minor grumbling aside, it’s well worth one’s day to navigate the entire span of Highway 61 on Lake Superior’s North Shore. There are disappointingly few vantage points of Lake Superior from the highway in St. Louis and Lake Counties, but seems to be one every two or three miles in Cook County, especially in and around Grand Marais, the only incorporated city in a 100-mile stretch of highway between Silver Bay and the Canadian border. Only a few miles north of Grand Marais is Eagle Mountain, which at 2,300 feet above sea level is Minnesota’s highest point. I recall a landslide on Highway 61 on the southwest side of Cook County about 15 years ago that barricaded the highway. With 61 being the only road leading out of the county, the people of Grand Marais were trapped between the site of the landslide and the Canadian border until the debris was cleared out. Grand Marais has always leaned Democrat, particularly in state and local elections, but has recently moved in an even more leftward direction with the arrival of outsiders, the opposite of the trendline occurring in most of northern Minnesota’s resort and cabin country which have become more Republican with population growth.
#17. Browns Valley (Traverse County, est. pop. 675). When I ventured into Minnesota’s aforementioned “western hump” region for the first time eight years ago, I wasn’t expecting much. To my surprise, the flat farmland that typifies western Minnesota terrain yielded to the hilly plains of the North/South Continental Divide. The geological history of the region, known as the Traverse Gap, is incredibly complicated and even my thorough reading of its history on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traverse_Gap) left me more confused than ever. Whatever the case, the scenery is very impressive for western Minnesota, be it the rising slope of the continental divide across the border in northeastern South Dakota or the tree-lined highways running adjacent to both Lake Traverse and Big Stone Lake on the north and south side of the city of Browns Valley. Another claim to fame for the community occurred in the 1930s when a Paleo-Indian skeleton was unearthed in the area. The skeleton would later be known as “Browns Valley Man” and studied extensively by scientists. Even today, Native Americans make up more than 15% of Browns Valley’s population, most likely expatriates from the Sisseton Indian Reservation across the border in South Dakota. Unfortunately, Browns Valley is flood-prone and was hit hard again just last year, undoubtedly hastening the population decline in this already-struggling area. The combined influences of Native American culture and west-central Minnesota’s farm populist movement have long made Browns Valley a Democratic stronghold. As the population declines, the numbers have softened a little in the last 20 years, but the community has still voted comfortably Democratic in every state, local, and national election I’ve tracked.
#16. Chisholm (St. Louis County, est. pop. 4,800). Just about all of northeastern Minnesota’s Iron Range towns are rough around the edges to an extent. Aside from the decidedly blue-collar housing stock that would look more at home in the oldest neighborhoods of a major city than in small-town Minnesota, there’s an admirably irascible rebel spirit alive in the people, who use “theater night” loopholes in defiance of smoking bans in bars and proudly celebrate the region’s 19th century brothel culture with summer festivals named “Whorehouse Days”. Feisty state representative Tom Rukavina from nearby Virginia is the most colorful character in the Minnesota Legislature and is in many ways an excellent emissary for the region’s hardball and often contradictory demography. Adding to the conflicting image is the undeniable natural beauty that surrounds these towns and valiant efforts to smooth out the towns’ rough interiors with local attractions. Chisholm is at the forefront of this effort, fancying itself the “hub of the Iron Range” and features a mining museum with an underground shaft, the open-pit Hull Rust Mine, and the Iron World Interpretive Center. There’s also a statue of “the Iron Man” on the south side of town. Outside the context of the iron ore industry’s self-promotion, Chisholm also features a snazzy Bridge of Peace on the east side of town, with flags from countries all over the world flying above on both sides of the highway. While the insurgency of Asia’s steel industry has been brutal to the steel industry of the United States, it has actually proven beneficial for Minnesota’s Iron Range since the Chinese need the iron ore excavated here as much as Pittsburgh and Bethlehem do. I’m sure that constitutes a moral dilemma of sorts for the steelworker brotherhood, but it is nice to see at least a partial rebound of the long-suffering Iron Range, particularly on the west side of the range where most of the new growth seems to be occurring. All of the Iron Range is one-party territory, dominated by the DFL, but Chisholm seems to rubber-stamp Democratic candidates with even larger margins, averaging around 80%.
#15. Chandler (Murray County, est. pop. 275). I have waxed poetic about the subtle attractions of southwestern Minnesota’s Buffalo Ridge in previous entries, and the specific setting of Chandler, where the terrain of the Buffalo Ridge meets the Chanarambie Creek valley, helps give the community even more identity with bald, rolling hills much more reminiscent of the Great Plains than of the corn and soybean fields that dominate southwest Minnesota. Most of the city of Chandler is nestled near the bottom of the valley, surrounded by the bluffs formed by the Buffalo Ridge and the creek valley on both sides. The north side of Chandler slopes up the hill at a steep enough angle that I can hear my car engine strain when attempting to ascend it. My first visit to Chandler came in 2001, ten years after half of the community was destroyed by an F5 tornado. The town has a fairly “new” look because of it, and I’ve always been curious as to how much different the town looked before my first visit. The major downside of Chandler is its politics. I made passing reference to the substantial settlement of evangelical Dutch communities in Minnesota’s southwestern corner, and Chandler (along with nearby Edgerton) are the population centers of that settlement. As a consequence, Chandler is the second most Republican town in the state of Minnesota, giving the GOP an average level of support in the 85% range every two years and often times single-handedly providing the GOP the necessary margin of victory in otherwise DFL-leaning Murray County. In other words, drive through town, admire its beauty, and perhaps even talk about the weather with the generally friendly locals, but do not under any circumstance bring up politics!
#14. Marshall (Lyon County, est. pop. 13,000). Another town I have an explicable soft spot for based on my early travels, Marshall’s economy revolves around the Schwan’s Company, known for transporting frozen food products in yellow trucks to homes in the furthest reaches of the rural Midwest. I’m not sure if this statistic still holds up, but Schwan’s used to be Minnesota’s fourth largest company, and easily the largest company outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. As a consequence, Marshall is an island of impressive prosperity in a struggling region, with per capita incomes and home values more than double that of working-class Worthington an hour down the road. I’ve heard conflicting reports on how worker-friendly of a company Schwan’s is. A friend of mine who worked there part-time during college insisted “they treat their workers like kings”, but I’ve also heard the truck drivers are kept on an incredibly short leash. Considering the company’s outspoken preference for the Republican Party and its reputation for being proudly non-union, color me a cynic. Nonetheless, Schwan’s willingness to stand by Marshall given its many regional disincentives is at least worthy of some acclaim. As previously inferred, Marshall is also a college town, home to Southwest State University which has received a great deal of positive recognition for being one of the highest-quality, low-cost schools in the country. It undoubtedly makes college available and affordable to plenty of low-income students from the hurting small towns of southwest Minnesota who would otherwise have few other options. The presence of the college also helps to dilute what would otherwise be an insurmountable Republican advantage in this company town settled by conservative Germans. Republicans always seem to find a way to win in Marshall, but the margins tend to be fairly soft most years…much softer than several other German communities in Minnesota that are far less affluent.
#13. Kiester (Faribault County, est. pop. 550). In a previous profile, I made passing reference to my admiration for the smaller farm towns on the back roads of southern Minnesota struggling to survive in the changing economy but managing to maintain a stiff upper lip to camouflage their struggles. Faribault County is home to a number of little towns like this, and none of them wear the mask better that Kiester, an impressively well-kept Norwegian town a couple of miles north of the Iowa border. Of the 50 towns on my list, Kiester is the closest to where I grew up and the only town where I have familial ties, with distant relatives living in the town and plenty more buried in a cemetery between Kiester and nearby Bricelyn. The community’s perseverance can be seen driving down Main Street where a grocery store and even a single-screen movie theater continue to operate. The times have caught up with Kiester elsewhere, however. Their school district merged with a couple of other area districts about 15 years ago with the understanding that the school in Kiester would continue to function as the district’s shared middle school. As usually happens in such mergers, the district’s population center ultimately proposed a new school levy to consolidate the entire student body into one building. Kiester put up one helluva fight, recognizing that the closing of the school is the final nail in the coffin of a community’s demise, but ultimately lost, with the middle school either closed already or poised to close next spring. This vintage display of Scandinavian stubbornness is very consistent with the town’s identity, and thankfully it translates to its politics, where DFL margins almost always run 2-1 or better.
#12. Elba (Winona County, est. pop. 200). There are so many great towns in southeastern Minnesota’s bluff country, I could almost do a top-50 list of towns in only five or six SE MN counties. Some of the most impressive are the tiny, isolated towns off the beaten path, including the gem of Elba, nestled in a very deep valley in close proximity to the scenic Whitewater State Park. While most of the towns in Mississippi River Valley bluff country can be most closely compared to New England, the deepness of the valley in which Elba is located, and the look of the town itself, feels closer to the hollers of Appalachia minus the coal. Much of southeastern Minnesota was severely flooded last August (and is getting hammered again this week), and from what I understand Elba suffered some of the most serious damage in the region when the levy near the Whitewater River burst open. A guy from hometown was staying at Whitewater State Park the weekend the floods occurred and made the front page of the local paper with a very dramatic story of rescuing his four children amidst fast-rising flood waters. I haven’t been in Elba since the flood damage and hope the town hasn’t been too badly compromised. Politically, Elba has always leaned Democratic by varying margins without being a stronghold of DFL dominance.
#11. Wabasha (Wabasha County, est. pop. 2,500). Sticking in the same neighborhood of southeastern Minnesota, Wabasha has always been an impressive town on the banks of the Mississippi River and lays claim to being Minnesota’s oldest community (settled in the 1830s), but its profile has been raised further with the reemergence of the bald eagle from the brink of extinction a couple of decades ago. Particularly in the winter months, the warm waters of the Mississippi River provide a sanctuary for the majestic birds, which soar above the region by the thousands. The National Bald Eagle Center is located in downtown Wabasha, which I must admit is a challenge to visit for a guy like myself who’s always had a bit of phobia of large birds. Also scenic in the winter months is how refrozen snowmelt creates icicle waterfalls that glisten over the edges of the river valley bluffs near town. Ice fishing and ice shack contests are held in the winter in honor of the film “Grumpy Old Men”, which filmed several scenes in Wabasha. Another unique fixture in the city is a bridge that begins in the middle of town and slowly elevates for a few blocks before rising above the downtown streets and ultimately crossing the Mississippi River into Wisconsin. The politics of Wabasha have always been left-of-center, and Democratic margins have actually been growing in recent election cycles, with John Kerry pulling off an impressive 60% margin in 2004.
The exciting top-10 is only a couple of days away!
#20. Luverne (Rock County, est. pop. 4,500). Anybody who watched Ken Burns’ miniseries “The War” will recognize Luverne as one of the four communities profiled. Luverne is located along I-90 in the southwesternmost Minnesota county and is easily more connected to the culture of South Dakota than Minnesota. The landscape starts to get more South Dakota-ish as well as a tiny chunk of Rock County is the only region of Minnesota defined as the “inner coteau” soil type. I’m not entirely sure what that means, other than there are thick loess deposits, but for whatever reasons the vantage points from the freeway on both sides of Luverne are very extensive, enabling the driver to see homes and farms on either a prolonged horizon line or else a very convincing mirage of a prolonged horizon line. In my profile of Jasper, I discussed the pink quartzite rock abundant in the area (I was called out by one reader, but I don’t think “pipestone” and the pink quartzite I speak of are the same thing) and used in the construction and landscaping of that town. Several buildings in Luverne are constructed with the same unusual yet attractive rock, including the Rock County Courthouse. Heading north of Luverne on U.S. Highway 75, the Blue Mounds State Park is located near the crest of a large hill. I’ve never had the opportunity to go inside, but the park is full of the buffalo that used to roam the region before its human settlement. Rock County is a Republican stronghold, mostly due to the large percentage of Dutch evangelicals in the rural regions of the county. The city of Luverne is divided, but leans slightly Republican.
#19. Fairmont (Martin County, est. pop. 11,000). I definitely have a weakness for the southern Minnesota towns where I traveled with my dad doing vinyl repair work at car lots back in the early 1990s. Fairmont was another frequent destination, and on mornings when he was feeling particularly well-heeled, I was able to convince him to go out for breakfast at either the Perkins or Happy Chef just off the freeway. A decade later, my work at the newspaper in St. James led me to multiple interviews in Fairmont, and as was the case with my early encounters with the locals, I was struck by how friendly the people always seemed to be. At least up until lately, I’ve also been impressed by how well Fairmont has maintained its business sector given its stagnant population. The downtown area remains very nice and the string of lakes dotting the city’s south side makes for some nice lakeside drives in scenic neighborhoods. A 3M plant remains one of Fairmont’s main employers, along with a small meat processor that hosted a very high-profile visit from Paul and Linda McCartney in the early 1990s, both hyping some vegetarian dish that Linda was marketing with the company. The only major downside with Fairmont is its politics. Like most communities settled primarily by German immigrants, Fairmont is heavily Republican. Even Amy Klobuchar, who won the 2006 Senate race by 20 points statewide, only managed to eke out a one-point margin of victory in Fairmont. Republican State Representative Bob Gunther is from Fairmont and his district included St. James where I worked at the newspaper, so I got regular visits from him. Gunther, who ran a small grocery store in town and often gets some acclaim from Democrats for bipartisan overtures, always seemed to enjoy talking politics with me even though we didn’t see eye to eye. He was kind of a smartass at times, but I generally liked the guy. I definitely felt bad when I drove through town last year and discovered his store has apparently gone out of business.
#18. Grand Marais (Cook County, est. pop. 1,200). As scenic as it is, Cook County, at the tip of northeastern Minnesota’s Arrowhead region, is a frustrating area for a road-tripper, at least it is for this road-tripper. Particularly for someone who begins the day way down by the Albert Lea area, by the time you get to Grand Marais and Grand Portage and then backtrack on Highway 61, the only major highway in the entire county (!!), your day is pretty much over. It’s only when one is driving the 175-mile voyage northeast of Duluth that he or she can appreciate that the Grand Marais area is almost as far east as Madison, Wisconsin. Minor grumbling aside, it’s well worth one’s day to navigate the entire span of Highway 61 on Lake Superior’s North Shore. There are disappointingly few vantage points of Lake Superior from the highway in St. Louis and Lake Counties, but seems to be one every two or three miles in Cook County, especially in and around Grand Marais, the only incorporated city in a 100-mile stretch of highway between Silver Bay and the Canadian border. Only a few miles north of Grand Marais is Eagle Mountain, which at 2,300 feet above sea level is Minnesota’s highest point. I recall a landslide on Highway 61 on the southwest side of Cook County about 15 years ago that barricaded the highway. With 61 being the only road leading out of the county, the people of Grand Marais were trapped between the site of the landslide and the Canadian border until the debris was cleared out. Grand Marais has always leaned Democrat, particularly in state and local elections, but has recently moved in an even more leftward direction with the arrival of outsiders, the opposite of the trendline occurring in most of northern Minnesota’s resort and cabin country which have become more Republican with population growth.
#17. Browns Valley (Traverse County, est. pop. 675). When I ventured into Minnesota’s aforementioned “western hump” region for the first time eight years ago, I wasn’t expecting much. To my surprise, the flat farmland that typifies western Minnesota terrain yielded to the hilly plains of the North/South Continental Divide. The geological history of the region, known as the Traverse Gap, is incredibly complicated and even my thorough reading of its history on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traverse_Gap) left me more confused than ever. Whatever the case, the scenery is very impressive for western Minnesota, be it the rising slope of the continental divide across the border in northeastern South Dakota or the tree-lined highways running adjacent to both Lake Traverse and Big Stone Lake on the north and south side of the city of Browns Valley. Another claim to fame for the community occurred in the 1930s when a Paleo-Indian skeleton was unearthed in the area. The skeleton would later be known as “Browns Valley Man” and studied extensively by scientists. Even today, Native Americans make up more than 15% of Browns Valley’s population, most likely expatriates from the Sisseton Indian Reservation across the border in South Dakota. Unfortunately, Browns Valley is flood-prone and was hit hard again just last year, undoubtedly hastening the population decline in this already-struggling area. The combined influences of Native American culture and west-central Minnesota’s farm populist movement have long made Browns Valley a Democratic stronghold. As the population declines, the numbers have softened a little in the last 20 years, but the community has still voted comfortably Democratic in every state, local, and national election I’ve tracked.
#16. Chisholm (St. Louis County, est. pop. 4,800). Just about all of northeastern Minnesota’s Iron Range towns are rough around the edges to an extent. Aside from the decidedly blue-collar housing stock that would look more at home in the oldest neighborhoods of a major city than in small-town Minnesota, there’s an admirably irascible rebel spirit alive in the people, who use “theater night” loopholes in defiance of smoking bans in bars and proudly celebrate the region’s 19th century brothel culture with summer festivals named “Whorehouse Days”. Feisty state representative Tom Rukavina from nearby Virginia is the most colorful character in the Minnesota Legislature and is in many ways an excellent emissary for the region’s hardball and often contradictory demography. Adding to the conflicting image is the undeniable natural beauty that surrounds these towns and valiant efforts to smooth out the towns’ rough interiors with local attractions. Chisholm is at the forefront of this effort, fancying itself the “hub of the Iron Range” and features a mining museum with an underground shaft, the open-pit Hull Rust Mine, and the Iron World Interpretive Center. There’s also a statue of “the Iron Man” on the south side of town. Outside the context of the iron ore industry’s self-promotion, Chisholm also features a snazzy Bridge of Peace on the east side of town, with flags from countries all over the world flying above on both sides of the highway. While the insurgency of Asia’s steel industry has been brutal to the steel industry of the United States, it has actually proven beneficial for Minnesota’s Iron Range since the Chinese need the iron ore excavated here as much as Pittsburgh and Bethlehem do. I’m sure that constitutes a moral dilemma of sorts for the steelworker brotherhood, but it is nice to see at least a partial rebound of the long-suffering Iron Range, particularly on the west side of the range where most of the new growth seems to be occurring. All of the Iron Range is one-party territory, dominated by the DFL, but Chisholm seems to rubber-stamp Democratic candidates with even larger margins, averaging around 80%.
#15. Chandler (Murray County, est. pop. 275). I have waxed poetic about the subtle attractions of southwestern Minnesota’s Buffalo Ridge in previous entries, and the specific setting of Chandler, where the terrain of the Buffalo Ridge meets the Chanarambie Creek valley, helps give the community even more identity with bald, rolling hills much more reminiscent of the Great Plains than of the corn and soybean fields that dominate southwest Minnesota. Most of the city of Chandler is nestled near the bottom of the valley, surrounded by the bluffs formed by the Buffalo Ridge and the creek valley on both sides. The north side of Chandler slopes up the hill at a steep enough angle that I can hear my car engine strain when attempting to ascend it. My first visit to Chandler came in 2001, ten years after half of the community was destroyed by an F5 tornado. The town has a fairly “new” look because of it, and I’ve always been curious as to how much different the town looked before my first visit. The major downside of Chandler is its politics. I made passing reference to the substantial settlement of evangelical Dutch communities in Minnesota’s southwestern corner, and Chandler (along with nearby Edgerton) are the population centers of that settlement. As a consequence, Chandler is the second most Republican town in the state of Minnesota, giving the GOP an average level of support in the 85% range every two years and often times single-handedly providing the GOP the necessary margin of victory in otherwise DFL-leaning Murray County. In other words, drive through town, admire its beauty, and perhaps even talk about the weather with the generally friendly locals, but do not under any circumstance bring up politics!
#14. Marshall (Lyon County, est. pop. 13,000). Another town I have an explicable soft spot for based on my early travels, Marshall’s economy revolves around the Schwan’s Company, known for transporting frozen food products in yellow trucks to homes in the furthest reaches of the rural Midwest. I’m not sure if this statistic still holds up, but Schwan’s used to be Minnesota’s fourth largest company, and easily the largest company outside of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. As a consequence, Marshall is an island of impressive prosperity in a struggling region, with per capita incomes and home values more than double that of working-class Worthington an hour down the road. I’ve heard conflicting reports on how worker-friendly of a company Schwan’s is. A friend of mine who worked there part-time during college insisted “they treat their workers like kings”, but I’ve also heard the truck drivers are kept on an incredibly short leash. Considering the company’s outspoken preference for the Republican Party and its reputation for being proudly non-union, color me a cynic. Nonetheless, Schwan’s willingness to stand by Marshall given its many regional disincentives is at least worthy of some acclaim. As previously inferred, Marshall is also a college town, home to Southwest State University which has received a great deal of positive recognition for being one of the highest-quality, low-cost schools in the country. It undoubtedly makes college available and affordable to plenty of low-income students from the hurting small towns of southwest Minnesota who would otherwise have few other options. The presence of the college also helps to dilute what would otherwise be an insurmountable Republican advantage in this company town settled by conservative Germans. Republicans always seem to find a way to win in Marshall, but the margins tend to be fairly soft most years…much softer than several other German communities in Minnesota that are far less affluent.
#13. Kiester (Faribault County, est. pop. 550). In a previous profile, I made passing reference to my admiration for the smaller farm towns on the back roads of southern Minnesota struggling to survive in the changing economy but managing to maintain a stiff upper lip to camouflage their struggles. Faribault County is home to a number of little towns like this, and none of them wear the mask better that Kiester, an impressively well-kept Norwegian town a couple of miles north of the Iowa border. Of the 50 towns on my list, Kiester is the closest to where I grew up and the only town where I have familial ties, with distant relatives living in the town and plenty more buried in a cemetery between Kiester and nearby Bricelyn. The community’s perseverance can be seen driving down Main Street where a grocery store and even a single-screen movie theater continue to operate. The times have caught up with Kiester elsewhere, however. Their school district merged with a couple of other area districts about 15 years ago with the understanding that the school in Kiester would continue to function as the district’s shared middle school. As usually happens in such mergers, the district’s population center ultimately proposed a new school levy to consolidate the entire student body into one building. Kiester put up one helluva fight, recognizing that the closing of the school is the final nail in the coffin of a community’s demise, but ultimately lost, with the middle school either closed already or poised to close next spring. This vintage display of Scandinavian stubbornness is very consistent with the town’s identity, and thankfully it translates to its politics, where DFL margins almost always run 2-1 or better.
#12. Elba (Winona County, est. pop. 200). There are so many great towns in southeastern Minnesota’s bluff country, I could almost do a top-50 list of towns in only five or six SE MN counties. Some of the most impressive are the tiny, isolated towns off the beaten path, including the gem of Elba, nestled in a very deep valley in close proximity to the scenic Whitewater State Park. While most of the towns in Mississippi River Valley bluff country can be most closely compared to New England, the deepness of the valley in which Elba is located, and the look of the town itself, feels closer to the hollers of Appalachia minus the coal. Much of southeastern Minnesota was severely flooded last August (and is getting hammered again this week), and from what I understand Elba suffered some of the most serious damage in the region when the levy near the Whitewater River burst open. A guy from hometown was staying at Whitewater State Park the weekend the floods occurred and made the front page of the local paper with a very dramatic story of rescuing his four children amidst fast-rising flood waters. I haven’t been in Elba since the flood damage and hope the town hasn’t been too badly compromised. Politically, Elba has always leaned Democratic by varying margins without being a stronghold of DFL dominance.
#11. Wabasha (Wabasha County, est. pop. 2,500). Sticking in the same neighborhood of southeastern Minnesota, Wabasha has always been an impressive town on the banks of the Mississippi River and lays claim to being Minnesota’s oldest community (settled in the 1830s), but its profile has been raised further with the reemergence of the bald eagle from the brink of extinction a couple of decades ago. Particularly in the winter months, the warm waters of the Mississippi River provide a sanctuary for the majestic birds, which soar above the region by the thousands. The National Bald Eagle Center is located in downtown Wabasha, which I must admit is a challenge to visit for a guy like myself who’s always had a bit of phobia of large birds. Also scenic in the winter months is how refrozen snowmelt creates icicle waterfalls that glisten over the edges of the river valley bluffs near town. Ice fishing and ice shack contests are held in the winter in honor of the film “Grumpy Old Men”, which filmed several scenes in Wabasha. Another unique fixture in the city is a bridge that begins in the middle of town and slowly elevates for a few blocks before rising above the downtown streets and ultimately crossing the Mississippi River into Wisconsin. The politics of Wabasha have always been left-of-center, and Democratic margins have actually been growing in recent election cycles, with John Kerry pulling off an impressive 60% margin in 2004.
The exciting top-10 is only a couple of days away!
posted by Mark at 4:13 PM
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