MINNESOTA A State For All Seasons

Travel America, July, 2001 by Shirley Slater, Harry Basch

Just west of Osage is the Smoke Hills Arts Center, where artisans demonstrate their crafts all summer in workshops along a boardwalk at Smoke Hills State Forest. Strike out south from here and you can visit the home of author Sinclair Lewis in Sauk Centre and an excellent interpretive center. In Little Falls is the boyhood home of aviator Charles Lindbergh and a nearby state park named for the man who made the first solo transatlantic flight.

In St. Cloud, the commercial hub of central Minnesota, Munsinger and Clemens Gardens draw visitors to the banks of the Mississippi. Stearns History Museum includes a replica granite quarry, paying tribute to an important St. Cloud industry. Saint John's University, College of St. Benedict, and St. Cloud State University contribute to the city's vibrant cultural life.

As you move farther south, all around you are the tidy farms and white-steepled churches of southern Minnesota. The author of Little House on the Prairie is remembered in Redwood County's Laura Ingalls Wilder Museum.

RELATED ARTICLE: MINNESOTA'S ETHNIC HERITAGE

We toured Ironworld Discovery Center in Chisholm, a small town in northeastern Minnesota, last September when we arrived on a Saturday dedicated to the International Button Box Festival. It only took a moment to discover that a button box is an accordion and that this form of music did not fade with the death of Lawrence Welk but continues to be strong, at least in Minnesota. Music, storytelling, and polka dancing filled the day.

But Ironworld makes a worthwhile destination any day with its splendid museum on the history of the Iron Range and cultures of ethnic groups who arrived in the New World to work the mines. Most of the workers were Finnish, but they came from 43 different areas, including the Balkans, Scandinavia, Italy, Greece, Ireland, Germany, Belgium, Slovenia, Russia, Wales, and Cornwall.

A restaurant on the lower level of the interpretive center serves a buffet of ethnic foods, ranging from sarma (stuffed cabbage) and porketta (roast pork slices in a potato bun) to Cornish pasties and Polish sausages. On the day we visited, a local guest cook prepared a cottage cheese strudel and shared samples and the recipe with onlookers.

For kids, Ironworld has a small amusement park with a steam calliope carousel and Pellet Pete's miniature golf course. Also on the premises are a gem and mineral display, the Polka Hall of Fame, and a snack bar selling porketta sandwiches, sarma, bratwurst and Polish sausages with sauerkraut, and Pickle on a Stick.

The attraction features pioneer and early Scandinavian encampments, a tribute to the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) camps of the 1930s, and a vintage trolley to the preserved mining community of Glen Location, where one of the richest iron veins in the world was located.

Ironworld, located on U.S. 169 west of Chisholm, is open daily through September 9 and some fall weekends. Admission is $8 for adults, $9 for special events. Call (800) 372-6437 or log on to www.ironworld.com.