Minnesota Roadside Attractions is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4th, 2008.

We start to see roads really take off in the late 19th century and it is automobiles that really make it explode.

Making things that already exist, make them wider, make them better, make them connected to each other.

So those roads are getting into spots that the railroads never going to go to.

The Model T really becomes popular about 1908 - 1909, people are able to afford this because it's there for middle class families, depending on what you want to call middle class, but it's definitely accessible by a lot of people - these aren't just toys for the rich.

The tourism part is coming along alongside of it, we start to see, actually, that the state government is putting funds towards bringing tourism through advertising and things like that.

Minnesota is actually, in the 1930s, is the 3rd most popular tourist destination in the country behind California and Florida.

We're developing a reputation of "the land of 10 000 lakes," and it's fishing, fishing that is really driving it.

The resorts are there, they're being built up, and the "back to nature" movement, of course, isn't about being on main street in a small town, but these small towns are sort of the service hubs for these places too, and they're the places that are closest to the, to the trunk highway systems and so those are the places where people are stopping.

It's also probably the launching point to go to, you know, the resort that they're headed to or the campground that they're headed to.

They recognize early on that there's, you know, a new economy, and it was those early business leaders and communities that recognized it and they wanted to tell people about their communities too, and so I think that's what those roadside attractions are sort of so good at.

It's like it's, it's a great, not even one sentence description, of what the community is and what's important to them about it.

Bemidji acknowledged Paul Bunyan earlier than almost everybody else in the United States by building this beautiful roadside statue of Paul Bunyan in 1937, and it, it just continues to become more popular year after year.

In Bemidji, the statue was built for the Winter Carnival in 1937.

This was a ground swell out of community stewards of the day, so the actual statue was fashioned after the Mayor of Bemidji in 1937.

His name was Earl Buckland.

Mayor Earl Buckland stood in at a great 6 foot tall.

They tripled his size, so Paul Bunyan, the statue in Bemidji is 18 feet tall, three times the size of the Mayor of Bemidji.

He's made of cement and like how you'd stucco a house, and they were building him in the middle of the winter, getting him ready for the early January Winter Carnival.

Cyril Dickinson was, I would say, the lead architect on him.

Well, they had a big box covering him and they're building him down there, they had heat in there, and cement and everything, and it's coming up on the day of the celebration, and the town folks are going "Is he going to be ready, are we going to be able to take the scaffolding down around him?"

and Cyril said, "Oh, we got a problem, folks, we didn't build the box big enough, we put his head on his shoulders but we didn't have room for a neck."

So they just put the head right on the shoulders, and that gives Paul Bunyan a really unique look.

But you go back to 1937, you know the state wasn't even 100 years old then, tourism really didn't blossom up here until after World War II, so this was 10 years prior to tourism really coming onto its own.

Over the years, they've had a big rifle that was right alongside Paul Bunyan and many people ask "What happened to the rifle?"

Well, it was wood, and it succumbed to the weather so it basically deteriorated to the point where it was no longer worth saving.

Back then, it was like, okay, well, the rifle served its purpose and down the road the rifle went.

Back in the day, you could literally drive right up to Paul Bunyan and Babe and the shore of Lake Bemidji was immediately behind him, and sometime in the 1950s, late 40s-early 50s, they took out all of the cement streets in downtown Bemidji and they put all of the fill on Paul Bunyan Plaza.

He was so popular, the Rotary goes, "let's take it to the next level."

So the Bemidji Rotary Club commissioned the building of Babe The Blue Ox.

Babe was not always stationary, and planted in Bemidji, he was on a truck and they would take him to Winter and Summer celebrations all over the state of Minnesota, and right now, today, if you go down to the plaza and you look at Babe's eyes - they're red glass lenses off of a truck from 1938, so when he was mounted on the truck, the truck driver would hit the brakes and his eyeballs would pulse, and then they'd step on the gas, and the exhaust came out of the nostrils, and you could still see the exhaust pipes in his nose.

At one point, they said, "Let's put Babe right next to Paul," and they had the truck park down there.

Well, people are just going crazy taking these photos, so then they cemented him in permanently.

"All right , here we go, 1-2-3."

I do know that Kodak, in the early days, said that, Other than the Statue of Liberty and Mount Rushmore, they said Paul Bunyan was amongst, maybe even the third, most popular photographed roadside attraction.

I'm not even really quite sure if they thought Paul Bunyan and Babe were going to be around 75 - 80 years after they built him, but he's withstood the test of time, and he's, the love and the popularity is definitely there today.

Well, I know he's over 30 feet tall just sitting, or kneeling, if he stood up, they say he'd be 55 feet tall.

We claim, in this little town of Akeley, we claim to be the birthplace simply because the first printed word of Paul Bunyan was here.

There was a legend started, like in Maine with the lumbermen, and it was moved to Michigan and Wisconsin, Minnesota, and later on to Oregon and California but right when it got to here it was still just word of mouth.

A guy by the name of Laafin, who worked for T.B Walker in the Red River Lumber Company; he used it in the advertising and printed it.

That was the first printed word about Paul Bunyan.

It was an invention of Dean Krotzer who in 84 and 85 he'd put that up I think that Dean Krotzer approached Jerry Stevens and Louis Karl, he approached those two, and showed them a picture of what he could draw.

They paid Dean Krotzer to go ahead and make a model of it and then he made the statue.

He did most of the pre-work out to his place south of town, it's got a metal frame and then a fiberglass cover.

Then they moved the frame in, and later on he built the head, and then they brought that in and put it on a hoist and put it on top of it.

If you stood here very long and somebody stops and takes a picture, it's the most photographed item in Hubbard County, I'm sure of that.

You can sit in the hand and and take pictures that way.

They stop here, they might stop at the general store across the street, or one of the gas stations or perhaps a liquor store, or one of the ... there's a couple of antique stores, and so the city gets a lot of benefit out of it, it's obvious.

I think Mr Krotzer had a pretty good idea, he, you got to give him credit, it's an asset to the city.

"Hello down there, I believe I see Anna and Ryan, Gavin, Ava, Maya, and Rose and Byron.

"Roses are red, violets are blue, come on up here, youngsters, I'd like to have a picture with you."

This is Paul Bunyan and he's in Brainerd, Minnesota, 7 miles east of Brainerd, actually, between Garrison and Brainerd on Highway 18.

He's 26 feet tall standing, or sitting, excuse me.

He's got size 80 boots.

The Chicago Fair actually had him there - they had built the statue for that fair and when the fair was over with, Larry Lopp out of Brainerd decided to go and buy that and bring it into the town of Brainerd, it was in the Lopp family for many, many years and then the McFarlands, actually the daughter of the Lopp family, took it over.

the Lopp family actually brought it into Brainerd for the resort side of things to get the draw into the Brainerd area so people would come here to stay and the Maddens, Craguns, all of those guys, were actually involved in this, in the bringing here of Paul Bunyan.

The amusement park was going to shut down, the city of Baxter wouldn't help him out, keep him there, I actually went in to buy a log house and a little train that was there to put with our museum, and when I did that, I actually walked out that day buying the whole park.

In 2003, we actually bought the park and moved it out here, too, in between Brainerd and Garrison.

"Yes, I was at the old location for more than 50 years and I've been entertaining this neck of the woods for more than 7 years.

He was part of an amusement park right away, he was going to be a statue that met everybody that come into Brainerd on 210 and 371 there, and when that started to get real big, they put an amusement park with him with a lot of different buildings, that type of stuff, and when they did that, that actually was a good draw for the Brainerd area, it was huge for the Brainerd area.

"Hello down there."

There's so many people that actually come back for the history of this, and they'll bring their grandkids back here, and they'll tell them about the first time that Paul had ever talked to them, knew their name, knew what they were doing, why they were here, all of that kind of stuff, so it's been a draw for years and years and years and years.

A lot of the same equipment is here, a lot of the same statues are here.

For instance, the squirrel, Henry the Squirrel's here, he's been around for about 40 some years, so that all that kind of stuff is here, so they can actually take pictures with their siblings now and mark them with the pictures that they used to have.

"Have a great day."

He's smart, he's smart.

and actually, he's real good friends with Santa Claus.

So, I mean, he knows everybody, whether they've been naughty or nice,or whatever, and he actually talks to Santa Claus every winter so there it is.

"Only I work during the summer, he works during the winter.

He's got a beard like me and lives up in the North Pole and works during the month of December flying reindeer one night.

Yes, it's a big responsibility, but I manage."

We are in Hackensack, Minnesota, the home of Lucette Diana Kensack, located on the shores of beautiful Birch Lake.

Lucette is the creative masterpiece of Doad Schroeder.

He was an old-time resident and store owner in Hackensack.

In 1950, he constructed her out of a wooden frame and shaped with boards and metal lathe, and added some insulation and a good portion of cement and sand.

There were volunteers that helped him out, it took a lot of work to make a woman that was 17 feet tall.

In '51, they had a national contest to pick/choose a name for her and a gal from Iowa submitted the name Lucette Diana Kensack.

Lucette is maintained by the city of Hackensack; they paint her and clean her and take care of her and even in January, they put a 20-foot shawl on her, in time for "Back to Hack," which is our winter celebration.

In 1991, a high wind toppled her head off, then she had to have extensive repairs, and that's when they found out she was pregnant.

Paul Jr. was joined by her side and now he resides over by the old city jail.

Lucette grew much faster than any other children and her parents were in need of a bigger room for such a large girl on the family farm in Iowa.

Her aunt and uncle had a northwoods logging camp and asked for help to run their camp, so Lucette came up to Minnesota to help them out.

Once she arrived here, they realized they needed a bigger room for her to be.

They called upon Paul Bunyan to level some trees and make a building.

Paul arrived and with one swoop of his axe, he leveled enough trees to make her a home.

When Paul came to Hackensack to work on the home for Lucette, one day while he was out in the woods, he ran into her, and being she was more a suitable size to him, I think they fell in love instantly.

They had a suitable courting period and were married on June 9th in the Iowa Territory in 1938.

The actual marriage certificate and wedding band is on display at the visitor center.

On June 27, 1952 , the first "Sweetheart Days" was held in honor of Lucette.

"Sweetheart Days" has been a celebration since then, so coming up in 2022, it will be the 70th anniversary of "Sweetheart Days."

There are many tourists that come by to pose in front of her, get a picture of her.

I see a lot, being the Paul Bunyan Trail is right here.

Lots of bicycle riders come through town, always want to stop and have a picture taken with her, so she does get people to come into this part of our town.

It's Willie Walleye, that's where, we're the walleye capital of the world.

It's our trophy fish from Lake of the Woods.

The person that did it had an amazing vision, it was a local business and then they built it with some of his kids, and he had some pretty good for foresight.

The Lund family was really involved with it, the Olsons were the people that did it originally.

There was a couple other families that helped do a lot of the work and had the ideas.

They're all volunteers, there was no, they didn't get paid.

There was some fathers and then some sons and some family members that did all the work.

They actually molded it after a fish that was caught on Lake of the Woods, it used to sit in the hardware store up here.

It was actually molded and designed after a fish from Lake of the Woods.

There's actually a plaque up there that we dedicated to the family that originally had the idea, and had the foresight, and they got involved and did it.

The original walleye we replaced about 3 or 4 years ago.

It was 60 years old, the old one was getting so bad that it was just time that we needed to replace it.

The other one was of rotten chicken coop wire, so it all just rusted out.

It was 60 years old, so it had served its purpose.

We had a built down in Sparta, Wisconsin by a corporation down there that does stuff for parks; does slides and different things for water parks and different ...

It was a really cool process that we went through, it was really interesting.

It's sitting a little bit higher, we raised it up just a little bit, but it's the same, almost identical, in fact.

We made several trips down to Sparta, we seen things that we didn't think looked like it was right, so we had them make it a little wider, make it just so.

We wanted it to to be "dimension-wise", the same.

Texture-wise, it's not going to be the same, because it's a fiberglass replica, and the other one was plaster.

I guess, plaster like they put on the side of houses or whatever.

I've worked at the VFW here, 20, almost going on 30 years, and I get to look out the window and watch all the people stop and get pictures taken there.

I was leaving work one day and two buses stopped there, and there must have been about a hundred and some people standing in front of it.

People share, we have people on our community sites and stuff that show us pictures from a long time ago, even generations, they'll have their kids, and then their other family members will come along, and taking trips up here, I mean, it's, there's somebody there all the time getting pictures.

It's a great tourist attraction, right on the highway there, you turn right there to go to Canada so we get all the traffic that goes into Canada.

Yeah, it's amazing, we love it.

Well it's the world's largest tiger muskie and it's 30 feet long.

They started out with "World's Largest Muskie" but they changed it to Tiger Muskie because of Hayward, Wisconsin.

It's made of glass, and then they stuccoed it, and painted it.

In 1948-49, they decided, with the new businesses in town, and the new lumber yard, that they would have an attraction of some kind to get people to come to town.

The fellow down at the Gateway Station, Warren Ballard, had been working with muskies in Lake Beltane, so he thought they should build a big muskie, and he was a taxidermist, so he knew the structure of how a fish was built.

They agreed, decided it should be 30 feet long, and that they would have it in town here.

He started building it and then he had help from a few people and they got it done and in '49 they had a big celebration and they called it "Eddie Loft Days" because Eddie Loft started the lumber yard.

Then they thought "We better do this every year," so they decided to do it the next year and call it "Muskie Days."

One year, I know my husband helped re-do the fins on it because they got damaged in the teeth.

First, they were wooden teeth and people climbed in there and damaged them and so they made them out of metal.

Well, then, that was dangerous, so he has no teeth anymore.

"Touch its tooth, OUCH, reach all the way back in its throat, can you reach way back there?"

It's been a good thing for the "Muskie Days" event, and a lot of people stop and have their picture taken by the muskie.

My daughter had her picture taken in her wedding dress by the muskie.

When it was first put in here, there was nothing here, except a little shell of a place that was used for a food stand and since then, they've added this whole park.

it's been a very good thing for Nevis.

"Well, this is Pelican Pete, he's the world's largest pelican."

He's 15.5 feet tall and he was made of 120 bags of cement.

Well, they can just look and see him, and we don't have any signs that point to him, but I think most people, when they come to town, know he's there and it's just right by the rapids that we have.

A lot of people say, "I remember this when I was a kid," and now they're bringing their kids here, and their grandkids here, and a lot of people go to walk down there and get their picture taken by it.

That's a big thing, the kids like to go down and walk down there and get their picture taken.

He was built 64 years ago, and we just had a 60th birthday party for him, and we had cake and everything for him back 4 years ago, and he was just put there because a group of people decided we needed something in town to identify ourselves and we're Pelican Rapids , so they thought a pelican.

Truman Strand, who started Strands Hardware, was the guy who started the project and he had got a bunch of his friends to help and engineer the project.

And local city people that got together, and they had expertise in building things like this, and they just built it.

When it was built, they had the metal frame built and everything, and then our local Lake Region Electric Company took their big boom trucks and moved it into place so they could put the cement around it and everything.

It was just a fun project to do.

We don't know exactly how, but somebody found it on the internet, that they were trying to build a pelican that was big, a little bit bigger than the one we have, down in Australia But, because of the COVID that came along, they had to scrap their project, so we still have the World's Largest Pelican.

They were going to try and "up" us one!

He identifies us, just like a lot of the landmarks that everybody else has.

When you come to Pelican, you think "Pelican Pete" or the "World's Largest Pelican", because otherwise we'd just be another town.

This is the "World's Largest Turkey" sculpture.

It was put here in 1998.

At that point in time, we had actually, Swift- Eckrich's largest turkey production per capita plant here in Frazee, number one plant.

Number two was in Detroit Lakes.

So with all the turkey farms around the area, the turkey growers got together and they put up this monument to the industry.

Previously, in 1986, there was a white one here, that was paper mache and mesh, and other things, that actually burned down.

Well, they were doing some work on it and it caught fire.

Well, they had a hole in the top, and they were doing some work with a torch on the bottom, and it went up, just like starting a log in a chimney, and within 7 minutes, it was gone.

This one is actually made of fiberglass and a steel frame, and it's 22 feet high.

It kind of identifies us amongst the other quirky animals that are in the area.

Big Tom, here, kind of looks over our city beach and the main entrance to our city, here off of US Highway 10.

It's a great gateway to come in and meet some of the people in Frazee.

There's a lot of times there's people running around the park here behind me, The Lion's Park.

There's kids that come up here and play in the playground, mothers bring their small kids up here and spend some time up here, and a lot of people just come here because it's very calming over above the Ottertail River over here, which is a state water trail.

Well, I'll tell you, I think he'd be pretty tough if we had to cook him up, but just a few weeks ago here, we had our annual Turkey Day , 67th turkey day celebration, and we cooked up 600 pounds of turkey drummies, our sportsman's club, for that event, and we always have a big turkey luncheon on that day too, so turkey is still in here, even though a lot of the smaller operators are no longer going, have retired, after some of them 2 or 3 generations of being involved in the turkey processing business, or turkey raising business.

When you go around the tour of the lakes, it's interesting to see what has some value to each community, what they figure gives a representation of them, to the rest of the world, and the big Turkey Tom does that for Frazee, outside of wrestling.

What you're looking at behind me is the iconic Vergas Loon.

You know if you come to Vergas, you're going to see the loon.

In the late 50's, the fire department decided that we needed something to kind of signify this is Vergas, and bring people to town.

How they came up with the loon was, number 1, it's the Minnesota state bird, but number 2, of all of our lakes in the area, and at any point, you can see loons on one of the many hundreds of lakes just around in the Vergas area here.

They thought, why not have some iconic huge statue of a loon overlooking the lake?

We had a postmaster here back in the '50's his name was Ewald Krueger, and he came down here every day and would plant trees, he would water them, he would try to get the park so that it would be a good place, not only for his kids, but for visitors to come to.

Well, then the fire department decided that we would put a loon here.

Four people on the committee; Roger Hanson, Cal Urben, Roy Bruhn, and Gordon Dahlgren, all firemen, and they started raising money.

I think of raising money today and it's a little ominous, because, you know how much things cost.

They had to raise two thousand dollars ($2000.00).

That was a big deal back then, and the fire department kicked in the first $100.

They found somebody who had carved a small loon out of wood, a standing up one, and that's what they ended up that they wanted, was this standing up loon.

They got ahold of somebody by the name of Orville Nedested, who took on the project of the welding of the structure of it, getting that all done, he did that at his home.

Twenty (20) feet, I mean, these guys were not talking a small loon, they, they wanted something that was really going to stand out, and so it's a 20-foot loon.

When I stop and think of all those different people that were involved, that, to me, epitomizes small towns.

You started out with a small group of the firemen, and four people, and all it took was just asking this person, this person, this person, and you get so many different people involved, and they just kind of became invested in the project.

In 1963, they hauled it here and they planned a dedication, and , I mean, this wasn't just like "Oh, I'm gonna have 5 people here and we're gonna dedicate this loon."

They did it up big, they had the band here, they had skydivers, they had clowns, they had, I mean, just hundreds of people were lined up to get ready for the dedication, and you look at the pictures and they're all dressed up in their Sunday finest, it was probably on a Sunday afternoon.

They had a podium set up and they had it dedicated to the gentleman who first started getting the park to be nice, Ewald Krueger.

You'll see on the base of the loon, it says, Vergas Loon, it's the Minnesota State Bird, a community project sponsored by the Vergas Fire Department, and it was dedicated in 1963 in memory of Ewald G. Krueger, the Postmaster.

Here was a postmaster of the community that just loved this park and he kind of got everybody all going and probably planted some little seeds of ideas in people's heads and it just took off.

I know that the Community Club has kind of taken the, well, everybody in the community of Vergas takes the Loon on as their own if you're from this area.

We make sure it gets painted, at Christmas time we put a little wreath around its neck, and so it's all lit up.

I just love seeing families sitting there taking their picture with it.

I mean, they're driving by, and all of a sudden they'll stop, and then they'll come back, and they'll stop back down there, and the families will get out of the car and run over and take their picture.

I mean, who knows, maybe celebrities have even been down there?

That would be kind of fun to think of that.

When you talk to people and say, "Hey, do you know where Vergas is?"

and they're like, "Oh, is that where the loon is, down at the beach?"

Businesses come and go, unfortunately, people come and go, but this loon, I don't think it's going to go anywhere for a while and it's been here since the early 60s.

Gosh, it'll be fun to have generations going down the road that just say "Yeah, I live in Vergas, that's where that big loon is," but it's also important for those people to understand how it began, too.

I mean, that's why that's so much fun to be able to tell this story, because that loon didn't just happen, it was an idea, and it was a lot of work by community guys, and it does mean a lot to the community of Vergas.

Make sure you stop down at the loon, have a picnic, take the kids swimming, and just look over the lake; because if you're there at the right time of day, just as the sun is going down, or the sun coming up, I mean, you're gonna definitely see loons on the lake too.

This is an oversized river otter, built in the fashion of the great Minnesota roadside sculptures that you see throughout the state.

It is one of the largest otters in the world, if not the largest otter statue in the world.

It was constructed in 1972 as part of the Fergus Falls Centennial Celebration, dedicated on the 4th of July holiday in 1972.

It was the project of a group of high school students, under the direction of Mr. Steve Janisch, who was a local metal worker/metal artist, so they framed it, and then a local plaster contractor, a man named Vince Kildee, did the plaster work.

It was a real community project.

There was no outside help, no outside company or artist, but done by high school students with some help, and then it became a project of - sponsored by the Fergus Falls Jaycees.

It's owned by the City of Fergus Falls, it's located in Adams Park here by Grotto Lake, and so the city maintains it.

They do the lawn mowing and so forth.

It was built so well that I have, very little maintenance is required of this.

It is just, it's not going anywhere.

Despite the severe winters and all the snows and the rains, the otter stands the test of time.

The nickname of our otter sculpture is Otto the Otter, and it really has become a community icon.

You can see there's a picnic table at the side of the otter, that becomes the base for people, kids and adults, to climb up on the back of the otter, and so the imagery of Otto the Otter is used in promotion, it is used in the marketing of Fergus Falls, it is, in essence, Fergus Falls.

It just is another added attraction, it's part of our lore, part of our history now, and this is what makes communities unique.

A young woman named Bonnie Olson, who was writing for The Otter, which was the high school newspaper, and when the statue was being conceptualized, she wrote a little "tongue in cheek" piece.

She said, "Visualize if you can, the unveiling ceremony of the Great Otter.

The Pelican Rapid's Pelican can cut the red ribbon around the neck, while Brainerd's Paul Bunyan lets it sit on his lap, and, in the background, the Vergas Loon sings "Welcome to My World."

"It should be quite an event."

We are in Rothsay, Minnesota.

Right behind me is what we call "Big Boomer."

He's our large prairie chicken roadside attraction.

People call him all sorts of names, we call him the "Big Chicken," "Big Boomer," the Prairie Chicken Society likes to call him that.

If you traveled on I94 between Fergus Falls and Fargo, ND, you've passed him plenty of times, and we're fortunate enough to have a truck stop, you'll probably hear some trucks come back and forth a few times, it's amazing how many times we have people here just stopping and having a quick break, having a lunch, people taking pictures with it.

There's a Twitter feed that shows the Minnesota Roadside Attractions, or something like that.

You'll see the Prairie Chicken posted in quite a few pictures.

I see families do Christmas card pictures with him from the area.

It started back in the mid '70's.

This is kind of the south end of the natural prairie chicken range, and the Minnesota Prairie Chicken Association was working with some people locally, and they wanted to kind of proclaim Rothsay as the Prairie Chicken Capital of Minnesota.

The next summer we had the bicentennial for Rothsay coming, so they wanted to have something to kind of celebrate that with.

One of the members of the board, Art Fosse, who is from Rothsay, basically said, "Hey, we can make this happen."

"So Rothsay is the prairie chicken capital of Minnesota, I'll build a statue."

Once that was all kind of detailed and confirmed and they were able to state it as the "Prairie Chicken Capital of Minnesota, Art Fosse went went to town on it.

He worked with the Prairie Chicken Society.

He went down the to some museums and took a bunch of pictures of mounted prairie chickens and brought those diagrams back, and actually went to the school auditorium and blew it up like 5 or 6 times the size of what the prairie chicken is, and then started sketching everything on cardboard.

After he kind of got the whole plan sketched up, he ended up working with the school and some local welders around the area.

It's all welded frame, and the school kids went inside and started plastering everything.

So it's a big I- beam, it's kind of like the backbone, and then it's just a bunch of metal rebar that was shaped to form the prairie chicken, based off of the drawings that Art came up with.

It was finished, I think it was early summer, so June or maybe the end of May of 1976.

Where Rothsay sits at is at the, it's like a narrow beach at end of Lake Agazziz, but then after everything dried up, this just became a natural prairie, it doesn't grow tall prairie grass, and that's what attracts the prairie chickens.

In the spring, it's, it's a ruckus, right, they're snapping their feet, their orange puff pockets all come out, they do a little dance for the ladies, it's, it's pretty fun to watch, if you ever get a chance to get in a blind and watch in the spring, it's great.

We don't have to do a lot with him, the plaster is really held up pretty well.

The paint that they use is an oil-based paint so it doesn't need a whole lot of TLC throughout the years.

There's a couple of things, specifically on the cheeks, that we'll probably need next year, come back and touch that up again, but the rest of it is really pretty good.

Last year we had planned a "Light Up The Chicken Party," but with COVID, we had we had to put it off, but we're planning for it already this year.

Last year we had a bunch of Christmas lights strung around the trees, and we got a Christmas hat made for it, and yeah, it was a lot of fun, a lot of people had fun with that, and taking pictures and visiting it.

We're gonna do a little bit more this year so it'll be kind of fun to make that a tradition and get more of the community involved.

One of the fun things about it, right, is if you meet somebody, I'll meet somebody in Minneapolis, or someplace locally in the midwest, and if they've been through here and I'll say Rothsay, they'll say, "Oh, I've been there, I've seen the prairie chicken," so it's really interesting just how many people have been through here and has seen it, and taken a picture of it, or had a picnic lunch here, or something like that.

We're in Nyberg Sculpture Park in Vining, Minnesota.

It started as a joke.

When I made my first sculpture, I made a family tree for a couple, who, over in Henning, were getting married and they needed a family tree, so I built it just out of scrap, just in a hurry, just a dumb looking thing.

We put it up in their yard when they were on their honeymoon, and had their names on a plate on the bottom and on the fruit on the tree had first names with years in advance.

After that, I thought of the foot, and everything happened since that, it certainly wasn't planned.

After that, they built this place.

That square knot, it was the first one in here, and it would have been immediately after it was built.

It's all steel and welding, it's all welded up.

There's a structure inside of them, which consists of a lot of rebars and also old pipes and angles from boat lifts or docks, or whatever I happen to get.

Well, the watermelon is because of, we have "Watermelon Day" here, and we've had it for 50 years.

After I got going on the sculpture thing, a lot of folks in town would ask me "When are you going to build a watermelon?"

and this went on a few years, but I finally did it.

That's kind of crazy too, I just decided to build a spoon, well, in the process, I'm thinking maybe I should have something besides that, so then I built a knife, and now is the question "how to mount them?"

I decided maybe they should have legs and arms and be dancing.

It's a sculpture of an astronaut, and it's not actually my daughter, but it's because of her.

Before she got in the program, we were down in Houston, and we were taking pictures of a wall with the hole in it, they put their face in it, and there was a picture of an astronaut flying around, and that's when I kind of decided I should make one.

My son was after me for a while to make a hand throwing a football, so I finally caved in and did it.

Most of it has no real reason, it's just something to do, something different.

I might wake up at night thinking of something, or think of some things and I let it go by the wayside and think, you know , go with something else so it's hard to describe that, though.

I really don't have a favorite; a lot of people ask me that and usually when they do, they'll tell me their favorite.

Well, my background is just what you see, I didn't do it as a younger person, I don't know, I was in my, I was close to 40 or something when I started, never had any training, never went to school for it, or anything like that, it just happened.

A lot of people have come to town just for this, they've seen it on tv, different places, so they'll make a special trip to look around.

It's been pretty interesting.

I'm sure there's a lot of people that don't give a hoot about it, but an awful lot do.

This is the "World's Largest Hockey Stick," more commonly referred to as, "The World's Largest Freestanding Hockey Stick," in Eveleth, Minnesota.

It came on the 15th of September, 1995, and it's been here for 26-27 years now.

A group of businessmen meet every Monday at the local cafe, and one morning the topic was "What could we do to help bring more people into town?"

The topic went towards an attraction of some sort, of course with a hockey theme.

We discussed some things but one of the fellows had an idea of a huge puck sitting down in the downtown area that might get people to turn into town.

In checking into whether or not we could put in a puck, we wanted to get it in the World Book of Records, if we could.

We checked, found out that it would have to be made exactly the same way, and that caused some problems, so another party from the Hockey Hall of Fame said, "Why don't you think about a stick instead of a puck?"

So we went in that direction.

We contacted Christian Brothers up in Warroad, who manufactured sticks, made an appointment, contacted them, asked them if they would consider building this stick, showed them a scale model, and in fact, they said "Yes, we would like to do that, we have ties to Eveleth Hockey Hall of Fame and hockey, in general, and we would like to provide that stick to Eveleth."

It's got their name on the side to this date, so yeah, it's very appropriate.

All the kids in school got let out the day that it left on a truck so they could wave it off and followed down with a Highway Patrol all the way from Warroad to a great reception here on the main street, and that's when it all started.

2007, I believe, the second one came.

We wanted a hockey stick built the same way and that's how it was built, just exactly like the regular one, but if you leave a regular one outside, it starts to deteriorate, we hadn't planned on that, so it did deteriorate, and it was determined they needed to replace it with something a little more weather resistant.

It's made of similar materials, it's a little bit longer, a little bit heavier, but also made with more of a marine-type material that will withstand the weather, and even something like that, as you can see, it's been there for quite a few years and it weathers like the real thing would, but it's not to a point of being dangerous or falling over, it's doing its job, bringing people to town.

Robert Mars Company owns Conveyor Belt Service up here, and they asked if they could provide that puck, so it was baked at 265 degrees for 3 hours, that's how you bake a hockey puck.

Just a perfect community event where everybody was pitching in, just a lot of a lot of community support; contractors, especially, that would dig the holes and put the foundations in.

The hardware store across the street donated his wall so we could put a mural on it.

It was a lot of that, and it had good legs because it just made sense, it was bringing the theme downtown and that's where we needed it, and it was the right thing, being hockey, so It did what it was supposed to do.

it got some people to come downtown.

People that come downtown should be somehow told to go to the Hippodrome and to go to the Hockey Hall of Fame, people that go to the Hockey Hall of Fame should be suggested to come downtown and go to the Hippodrome, so now there's a circle of people that are getting into town, and that was the idea.

It's working, and there'll be busloads, there'll be weddings, have their pictures taken out there.

Paul Wellstone, Henry Boucha, a lot of hockey players, a lot of politicians, have their pictures taken around this hockey stick in Eveleth.

It's been a good thing, bring people to town, it's been healthy, and it makes sense.

I'm just curious how long it'll stay there, hockey history will go on forever, and as they continue to build that plaza over there with the statues and the other information, it's a wonderful growing tree, is what it is, of hockey in this town, in the downtown, not to take away from Hockey Hall of Fame, but that's on the highway, and this was intended to bring people downtown, so I think it'll be a good thing to watch over the years, and it'll be fun.

These roadside sculptures were meant to add, be an attraction, for a community and they've worked.

They're quirky, they're unique.

"She does get people to come into this part of our town."

It was an idea and it was a lot of work by community guys.

It's an asset to the city, it's interesting to see what has some value to each community.

I think that's what those roadside attractions are sort of so good at, it's like, it's a great "not-even-one sentence" description of what the community is and what's important to them about it.

Minnesota Roadside Attractions is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people, November 4, 2008.