Due to my son's involvement in school sports, I have done more traveling around MN in the last 10 years than I did in the previous 30. I think I have seen the inside of every half-filled basketball arena in SE MN now. And many, many small towns.
While dropping off a bike at MotoPrimo yesterday, John and I traveled via what Garmin said was the quickest route, taking us on a busy county road I'd never been on before, one near Apple Valley. Around a bend I saw the oddest structures on the side of the road; old steeple-style chimneys, probably twenty stories tall. What was the place? After a (terrible) lunch we drove back on the same county and road where we stopped and looked around.
We trundled off through the woods to reach the structures and were instantly met by an injured deer. It had been shot through the back and its back legs were paralyzed. There was a time when my deer compassion was flowing in good health, but after having deer eat my plants last summer this time I kept walking, but was wary as I remembered it was deer season. Men in orange with guns. And beer.
As we walked to the first structure a car stopped and a man told us that this area was a munitions plant in WWII and that we could "find out all about it on the Internet".
Bomb blast structures line the road, put there so that if the plant suffered a accidental explosion that it would not take out the neighboring towns. They are built of thick cement and stand 30-40 feet in the air (picture above).
The cement buildings and guard towers/chimneys are still in decent shape for being 50-odd years old. But as John pointed out, the cement walls on some of the structures are almost two feet thick. The sidewalks and other municipal items are still in amazing condition.
Some web reaserch shows that over eighty farms were displaced in WWII so that 12,000 acres of land could be used to build this small city. It goes on for miles and miles. The ground seems to have been poisoned by the process of making artillery shells and the land is not suitable for population or even farm use. The U of Minnesota owns it now.
I took some snaps, and we were cold so we jumped back in the truck ... only to find --- two miles down the road-- an identical group of structures. Yes, the government many times will just build two when one might suffice.