Pipestone

Pipestone, Minnesota

One of those places you never heard of, a little off the beaten path.  Pipestone National Monument is here, a sacred place to the Sioux who used the soft catlinite stone found here to make pipe bowls for medicine pipes.

The town of Pipestone, population about 4,000, is the civic center of many thousands of acres of corn and soy beans.  It’s 30 miles from the nearest freeway, and even further from a town you ever heard of.  Unlike many of the small towns we’ve passed through on this trip, the quaint old downtown seemed economically healthy with no empty storefronts that I could see.  The two or three blocks that form the city center are made from hand hewn local stone with a reddish hue.  Most buildings are from the late 1800s.  One that caught my eye had been built as an opera house. There were seemingly random gargoyles protruding from the exterior walls, not terra cotta (fired clay), but carved stone with the faint chisel marks still visible.  A plaque explained that the original owner of the building was an amateur sculptor and had carved these himself.  He was a successful business man who, I imagine, went out to the stable and hammered on rocks in the evening. It was probably good for his marriage.

As we walked through the town on a warm and soft summer evening, suddenly looming above the hardware store, we could see the top of a fire truck boom with water gushing from the nozzle.  'There must be a fire', we thought.  Walking around the corner, it became apparent that the fire department, under the guise of training, had created a 50-foot waterfall into the fire station parking lot that the children of the town frolicked and shrieked in.  A nice town to grow up in.