- Hi, I'm Kaci Johnson, the Associate Director here at the Legacy of the Lakes Museum in Alexandria, Minnesota, and this is our artifact spotlight.

(upbeat music) I'm standing here with our Falls Flyer collection that we have here at the museum, and Falls Flyers were created by Larson Boat Works and Larson Boat Works is one of those Minnesota brands that is instantly recognizable all over the world.

They have built many, many boats for many, many years.

It all started with Paul Larson way back in the 19 teens.

So he built his first boat at age 11, but he sold his first boat at age 19.

By 1925, he had opened his very first factory on the Mississippi River in Little Falls, Minnesota.

Primarily, they built wood boats, but eventually in the 1940s, they broke into aluminum boats, which eventually became Crestliner.

And then in the 1950s, they experimented with fiberglass.

The Falls Flyers are a very unique boat that is extremely special and highly sought after today.

Falls Flyers were built by Larson to celebrate and honor his friend Charles Lindbergh, who is a fellow little Falls Minnesota native.

Larson based the design of the Falls Flyers off of Lindbergh's JN-4 Jenny Biplane, and he even based the color scheme off of that, which is the cream, red and black.

This one here is a 17 foot from 1939.

This one is extremely rare, it's the only 17 foot that was ever built, but they did have a 21 foot model available, and it wasn't actually very popular because it's an inboard, and it was kind of tippy if you look at the design and whole shape of this boat.

So they weren't very popular, but that didn't stop them, and many more Falls Flyers came after that.

In addition to building inboards, Larson also built Falls Flyers outboards.

And so the difference between those is that inboards have the engine inside and outboards are a separate motor that's attached to the back.

Falls Flyers were constructed a little differently than many mainstream wooden boats at the time period, in that they were using Cedar strip construction.

Cedar Strip actually takes thin pieces of cedar and glues them together rather than using the wide planks.

And so it glues the cedar strips over an oak frame, and then after that, you take airline canvas or airplane canvas and glue it over that frame.

So that's where you get this.

It does look like fiberglass, but it is actually canvas.

Another fun detail that's a nod to just Minnesota heritage is that a lot of the Falls Flyers have little loon decals on the nose of the hulls.

Falls Flyers were produced by Larson through the 1930s, forties and fifties, but by the 1960s, demand for them had lessened, and at that time, they hardly looked like this anymore.

We have another Falls Flyer here at the museum that's a 1958, which is one of the last years that Larson produced Falls Flyers, and you can see that the design of them is still technically inspired by flight, but in a different way.

So in the 1950s, there was the space race and people's fascination with getting to the moon, getting to space, and so a lot of automotive design took its nod from rocket ship design.

So you see a lot of tail fins on cars, well boats of the time also then incorporated the tail fin design.

And so our 1958 Larson has that tail fin design on it.

Another unique piece of Falls Flyer history that we have here at the museum is a Falls Flyer automobile.

Now, this is not an amphib-a-car, you can't just drive it into the lake, but it is made out of a boat that was put on a Volkswagen chassis in the 1960s, and then they custom built all these fenders and pieces on that car.

It's just a really cool thing and it draws a lot of people's attention to the museum and gets them in so we can share the rest of the Falls Flyer story with them.

What I love about Falls Flyers is that they really are something that shows Minnesota lake life, but also the industry that Minnesota lake life inspired.

So many unique designs and boat shapes and looks came out of Minnesota through Larson, Lund, Crestliner, Alumacraft, all these different brands and these Falls Flyers are just one of the many, many different styles that you can see out on Minnesota's lakes today and even beyond.

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