(gentle music) - [Matt] Detroit Lakes is really a destination place.

We get tourism here.

It's a great place to come and visit.

People want to live here.

(gentle music) - The original name of Detroit Lakes, big and little Detroit Lakes, is Gaiajawangag.

And that's the Ojibwe word, and it means a crossing in a sandy place.

The town was founded in 1871 but years and years and decades and decades and decades before that, where the city sits now is at an access point of four ox cart trails.

They went from Minneapolis to Winnipeg and Pembina in North Dakota to Brainerd.

And they all kind of met right here at this lake.

So we were kind of bound to be a trading area to begin with.

The first settler who came and built where Detroit Lake city is, was Colonel George Johnston.

He was a Civil War soldier.

He came here and he built a flour mill on the river.

He needed employees.

So people started moving and that was really kind of the catalyst of why the town was built right here.

The father of tourism is John K. West.

And he was really responsible for coming up with the sort of Detroit Lakes propaganda to get people to come here as tourists, not just to come here to live and work.

(gentle music) - We have great tourism, but we also have a lot of good industry here.

We have some manufacturing facilities.

We've got a pretty vibrant retail community here in Detroit Lakes.

(gentle music) - The water here has been so many things.

It's been industry.

The logging companies needed to use the water to transport the logs.

The tourism started almost immediately with the town to try to get people to come here.

And they're showcasing this.

You can't imagine how clean and pure this water is.

You can scoop out of the lake and drink the water out of the lake, it's so pure.

(gentle music) I worked here for five years.

I had a pretty good grasp of what made Detroit Lakes, Detroit Lakes.

We came up with a list of what we thought were the most important bullet points that I needed to cover.

And then as I got into it, it got more and more, and it grew into this huge 33 panels that's just history.

(gentle music) - 150 Sails is reflective of the 150 years that Detroit Lakes has been and the 150 years to come.

It's amazing amount of work, amazing amount of beauty that just makes our community shine.

Our logo is Sales Up, our pride is just the Lakers.

So the sailboat was what we kind of settled on.

And so I designed the main shape and the look of it.

And then we met with a local company and they agreed right off the bat to do the whole thing, to help sponsor the fabrication.

So we knew we would have these sailboats.

We planned to do 75 large, over four feet, and 75 tabletops because some places don't have public space to put a large sailboat sculpture.

What's amazing is every artist got the same three-dimensional canvas.

It was a white sailboat sculpture.

And to see where their imagination took it, we have it ranging from a Monarch butterfly to wildlife, to seasonal, to landscape, to mosaics, photography.

And we have artists that have done multiple pieces and we've had artists as young as 10 on up to 82.

It's amazing to see what the imagination and creativity is.

And then to have the sponsors support that by picking these different artists, people were just amazed.

They were just blown away by the diversity of what the artwork, that colors, what these things would be.

And now people drive around town, the comments are is they're just tickled to see these things when they walk into a business or they go to a park or they drive around town and they see these sculptures everywhere.

They're fun splashes and creativity and color.

The whole point of this is to get people to come to Detroit Lakes.

To see that the retails, the different locations, different businesses in our parks, within our community, the amenities that Detroit Lakes has.

(gentle music) - It's the people that make it special here.

It's a beautiful place to come and visit, and people want to live in work here.

- It's the sense of community.

As I was going through the research, our whole team here was involved in the research for this.

And we were finding letters that people were writing to each other and writing to their friends back east and writing to their legislators and saying, this place here needs to have this, or it needs to have this new amenity, or we should build a pavilion.

We've seen the community spirit all the way from the beginning, and it just flows all the way through.

It's not a surprise that the sense of community in Detroit Lakes is the way it is.

- And that's really the heart of soul, I think, of what Detroit Lakes is, is we really support everybody to make sure our community shines bright.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.