We stopped for lunch in Ortonville during our trip to photograph some places in July of 2012, and we couldn’t pass up the chance to shoot a few places in such a beautiful little town. Ortonville is a small resort town of about two thousand nestled on the southern shore of Big Stone Lake, right on the South Dakota border. Downtown Ortonville cascades down the side of a hill to the beautiful lakeshore, and is dotted with historic structures. Most…
This is what remains of Wee Town Outlaw Speedway (also known as Lake Region Speedway and West Central Speedway) northeast of Fergus Falls. This was once a very cool place to watch stock cars and outlaws. Fergus Falls Journal wrote an interesting story about this place back in 2007. Originally opened in 1962, the speedway went through multiple owners and several periods of inactivity over the years. In 1986, high water began to become a problem at the speedway, and…
In the early morning hours of September 24th, 1909, Ben Snyder was sleeping in the power house of the Fergus Falls City Light Station, a hydroelectric power station on the Ottertail River near Fergus Falls. On-duty was a second man, N.P. Johnson. At 4:20 in the morning, a rumble awakened Snyder, and he noticed the lights flickering and water splashing onto the platform of the dam, which was barely a year old. He immediately recognized that something was seriously wrong,…
To be clear, the Bergquist Cabin is described by the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County as the oldest home in Moorhead still on its original site. (There is another cabin, built in 1860, which has been moved a number of times, even disassembled and put in storage at one time, which now stands in Memorial Park at the Hjemkomst Center) At any rate, it’s fascinating to stand before this little, one-room log shack and imagine what it must…
As school children, most of us learned about the last ice age, in the Pleistocene Epoch, during which the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered more than half of North America. Between 13,000 and 8,500 years ago, the ice sheet went through multiple melt phases in which the ice sheet created a giant glacial lake–Lake Agassiz, named for Swiss-American Geologist Louis Agassiz, one of the first to postulate about our past ice ages. Lake Agassiz was a massive body of fresh water…
This is War Memorial Bridge, sometimes known as Climax Bridge due to its proximity to Climax, Minnesota. The bridge’s official designation is MNDot Bridge #7097. War Memorial Bridge spans the Red River on Minnesota’s western border, between Polk County, Minnesota, and Traill County, North Dakota. War Memorial Bridge was built in 1957 and it is considered a significant historical bridge by the state of Minnesota, due in part to its unique construction. As described by MNDOT’s historic bridges page: The…
Donnelly is in Stevens County, Minnesota, about 10 minutes northwest of Morris, and home to about 241 people as of the 2010 census. It was founded in December 1871, and was originally known as “Douglas”, but was renamed Donnelly in honor of Minnesota Congressman Ignatius Donnelly. Congressman Donnelly is perhaps better known for his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, a work which maintains Plato’s writings on Atlantis are factual. The book became the basis for many of the Atlantis legends of…
The former Port of Entry in Noyes, Minnesota was a haunting abandoned relic when we visited in 2013. Check out our new video featuring some history and updates on the fate of this place after a government auction in 2014. This video was uploaded at high quality, so if you have the capability to stream it to your TV, definitely check it out on the big screen. See also: A Haunting Abandoned Port of Entry in Noyes, Minnesota Original content copyright ©…
Beardsley is in Big Stone County, in the “elbow” of Minnesota, where Lake Traverse, Big Stone Lake, and the Little Minnesota River carve into what would otherwise be South Dakota’s territory. Beardsley had a population of 200-plus residents in the 2010 Census. Beardsley’s schools were consolidated with Graceville and Clinton, Minnesota long ago. In the photo above, the former High School is in the foreground, and behind it on the left, Beardsley’s other abandoned school, which now appears to be…
As we were planning a shoot that would include some Minnesota and Iowa places, we decided to visit Johnson, Minnesota, in Big Stone County, not far from the South Dakota border, to investigate one structure. The aerial view of the structure in our mapping software seemed to indicate a rectangular building with some kind of bell tower or steeple at one corner, so we marked it and made plans to visit under the assumption we would find an old fire…
I stopped in Effie on a whim when I happened to drive by the boarded-up public school on my way home from Togo. Effie is a quiet little town in Itasca County with a population around 130 according to the 2010 Census. In 2000, however, the Census only listed about 91 residents. If anyone knows the reason for the influx of residents between 2000 and 2010, I’d love to hear it in the comments. Effie, like most of the settlements…