Eddie Krakhmalnikov
Master's of Landscape Architecture Graduate Student, University of Minnesota

Rural Minnesota is rife with belonging, its identity having as much to do with people as to the buildings they construct and the land they call home. When we drive the rural roads in Minnesota, we see the softly undulating topography of the West, the flat terrain of the South, the wooded, stream laden landscape of the North. Here and there, towns appear in the distance. Often, they first become visible high above the ground, with their disembodied names floating above the stores and residences: vertically marking perceived permanence. Names and symbols of the town are hoisted into the air on mast-like water towers, which, from a distance, let the casual visitor know that infrastructure exists, that there is industry, trade and commerce. These structures mark more than just a town's cartographic locale. If you listen to the rain flow down the side of the metal support beams or look at the shape of the rust on the bottom of the tank, you come to witness a counter solipsism, a reminder that you are not alone - that stories and experiences of the past still exist on the land.

Aged water towers may long ago have dried up as functioning containers of water, filling up with nostalgia as the water drains. Layers of memory stored in the old town water tank are often dispersed too late, after the wrecking crews have done their work. They exist somewhere between commodities and place makers: as both billboard and "you are here" markers. The towers are cues to the hidden memories of the land, a part of the experiential mystery of the palimpsest landscape. They serve as reminders of the duality of movement and stillness, migration and embeddedness. These water towers tend to be of the highly vernacular sort, individual in style, shape, wordage and certainly story told. They are local agents of folklore, setting the stage for the myths we use to create identity and reinforce belonging.

Myths can be both whimsical and solid. They blow in the wind and exist in structures; as part of the bricks and mortar that support a building like nouns and adjectives piecing together a familiar greeting. The greatest sponges of local mythology tend to be the largest, most visible buildings. In rural Minnesota, communities have three types of significant vertical elements: the church and bell tower, the grain silo and the water tower and tank. Not everyone may go to the same church or work in agriculture, but everyone owns part of the protection stored in the communal water towers. If there is one single thread that spirals the entire identity of a town, then it must be the water supply. As such, water towers are inclusive, rather than exclusive symbols of a rural community's existence. Residents and businesses within the rural town rely on water towers to enable growth and vitality. The tower allowed greater industry and manufacturing, increase in jobs and populations and all the civic benefits, such as better schools, roads and public services that a larger non-agrarian population could afford. Important historical structures, especially of the vernacular sort, suggest a sense of "home" beyond physicality. Some of the most unique towers in Minnesota include Lindstrom's Swedish teapot, pointing to the town's cultural heritage and Pequot Lake's Paul Bunyan size fishing bobber, which suggests both mythology and fine fishing.

Another such structure was the water tower in Bovey, Minnesota. Bovey's tower was built in 1907 of wood, replaced in 1937 with cast iron and, due to extensive corrosion, demolished in 1992. The water tower had a flat bottomed tank, one of the last of this type built and likely the last standing in Minnesota. The phrase "Home of the Picture 'Grace'" was painted on the tank and refers an event that captured the artistic attention of the state. As the story goes, "In the war year of 1918, a bearded, saintly old man with footscrapers to sell called on Eric Enstrom at his photography studio in the tiny mining town of Bovey, Minnesota. The man's name was Charles Wilden." Enstrom asked Wilden to sit with his hands folded in prayer and placed next to him a bowl of gruel, a loaf of bread, a knife and a pair of glasses. "He wanted to take a picture that would show people that that, even though they had to do without many things because of the war, they still had much to be thankful for."

At first, the picture was not widely noticed but gradually became a favorite in churches, restaurants and homes. The picture is now the official photograph of the State of Minnesota. The living monument to acceptance and gratitude - such Minnesotan qualities - still exists in the memory of the story, though lessened perhaps with the disappearance of the tower. However, the city of Bovey has, in showing how solidly attached the water tower was to the identity of the community, built a monument to the story constructed of the remains of the tower and tank.

Like the great movement under the Janus like calm of the prairie, Minnesota's rural towns are hosts to unperceived migrations. Children of farmers move to the city, people looking to escape or migrant workers turned permanent residents move in. Yet, people also stay for generations. They experience the passing of history first hand, remembering former neighbors and memorable moments in the town from decades ago. In this way, history is equal part stillness and movement; a town's past does not just belong to the people that live there, but to every person that has ever lived there before. The importance of water towers as obelisks of experience can be seen in the National Register of Historic Places listing of five Iron Range water towers in Cuyuna, Deerwood, Trommald, Ironton and Crosby. "These landmarks [are] material reminders of the town's once prosperous mining economies. Cuyuna, Ironton and Trommald are now almost ghost towns."


Old water towers represent not only what once was, but that history bleeds into the present and that life continues: in both permanent and spectral forms. Many of these old water works were built of wood and did not pass the test of time. The 50,000 gallon tank in Elysian, Minnesota was built in 1895 and provided residents with fire protection . The Elysian tower was the oldest working wooden tower in the state until it's decommission and razing in 1989. Many such towers were replaced by welded steel tanks, such as the one in Ironton, built in 1913. The water tower as a symbol fluctuates with change, newer ones representing movement, older ones static stillness.

Often, urban America looks to rural areas for a sense of continuity, an important balance to the agents of change of technology and mobility. "We imbue the country side with a sense of the sacred and see in rural towns a stability that we do not attribute to big cities, which are more prone to rapid social change." Rural towns of the plains have a special place in the nation's history: the place of the original frontier, birthplace of manifest destiny and the threshold to westward expansion. The prairie landscape then is certainly tied securely to the historic evolution of the American story. Out of the largest, most recognizable buildings in the rural town, only the function of the water tower was shared by all residents, protecting the community from the hazards of fire and drought. Rural water towers are important markers of identity, reminders of belonging and, for many, absence and recollection. They are central agents in a web of memories that move us to remember a place and time that once was.

Footnotes:
1. Vanderlinde, Paul Historic American Engineering Record: Bovey Water Tower (HAER No. MN-59) U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service: 1992 p. 1
2. Vanderlinde, Paul Historic American Engineering Record: Bovey Water Tower (HAER No. MN-59) U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service: 1992 p. 10
3. Vanderlinde, Paul Historic American Engineering Record: Bovey Water Tower (HAER No. MN-59) U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service: 1992 p. 10
4. Vanderlinde, Paul Historic American Engineering Record: Bovey Water Tower (HAER No. MN-59) U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service: 1992 p. 11
5. Ziebarth, Marilyn Minnesota Water Towers on the National Register of Historic Places Minnesota History Magazine: Winter 1992 p. 2
6. Minnesota State Historical Society Historic American Engineering Record: Elysian Water Tower (HAER No. MN-19) U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service: 1986 p. 2
7. Spreng, Ronald They Didn't Just Grow There: Building Water Towers in the Postwar Era Minnesota History Magazine: Winter 1992 p. 136
8. Cordone, Michelle L. The Role of Vernacular Architecture in Small Town Identity and Economy: A Study of Mentone, Indiana [Thesis] Graduate College of Bowling Green State: 2007 p. 39

Image Citations:
1. Pequot Lakes, World's Largest Fishing Bobber www.flickr.com user: jcarwash31 Accessed on: 8/8/2011
2. Lindstrom, Lindstrom Water Tower www.flickr.com user: altfelix11 Accessed on: 8/8/2011
3. Bovey, Close Up of East Side Vanderlinde, Paul Historic American Engineering Record: Bovey Water Tower (HAER No. MN-59) U.S. Department of Interior National Park Service
4. Cuyuna, IMG_0821 www.flickr.com user: cageyj Accessed on: 8/8/2011
5. Ironton, Ironton Water Tower, www.flickr.com user: morganve Accessed on: 8/8/2011

I'm so glad that I have the opportunity to study in CRD. I'd like to introduce my experiences and some research that I have done in China.

I earned a Bachelor's degree in Soil and Plant Nutrition, a Master's of Land Resource Management, and a PhD of Soil Science at China Agricultural University.
Since graduate school studies, my academic research has been focused on land use and evaluation, especially land consolidation and engineering design.

Modern land consolidation emerged in 1998 in China. China's government put massive manpower, material and financial resources into the effort. The aim is to increase crop yield to guarantee the food security by originally employing two essential methods. The first is to protect the quantity of farmland by promoting land use intensity. The other is to improve farmland quality by building farmland infrastructure. With more than ten years of program development, the land consolidation program has produced multiple objectives: a significant reduction in land fragmentation, the realization of large-scale production, adjusting property boundaries, environmental protection, etc.

The area of a typical land consolidation project is usually more than 700 hectares and contains farmland infrastructure including irrigation, drainage and road improvements, woodland replanting, soil and water conservation engineering, and ruined land restoration. I have been engaged in two rural land consolidation projects in the last three years.

The above map is an example of the outcome of a land consolidation project.

Below are a few of images showing the type of improvements to landscape components allowable through land consolidation.

When I came to the University of Minnesota and CRD, everything, the beautiful environment, the life attitude and life style, and especially the landscape design were all different to me. I'd like to learn the different concepts and methods of landscape design from CRD and practise them in future land consolidation design projects.

I got my first real taste of rural Japan in June 2006--a big icy slurp of hearty north-country zarusoba (a traditional Japanese summer meal consisting of a tray of iced buckwheat noodles served with a cold dipping sauce). Nobuoki Kaneko, the stoic 60-something proprietor of the soba shop and my employer-host for the next month, was a one-man show. Not only did he make and sell his own soba, he planted, harvested and milled his own organic buckwheat as well. This was farm-to-fork (farm-to-chopsticks?) in the purest sense of the phrase, and certainly a memorable introduction to Japanese country life.

I had just finished my sophomore year at Pomona College, where I was studying Japanese and had just declared as a history major. Looking to travel and improve my language skills but wanting to avoid the steamy crush of Japan's big cities and tourist sites (with family in Tokyo and Kobe, I had already traversed much of Japan's "beaten track" during earlier visits), I bought a backpack and some rubber boots and headed to Japan's rural north. From June through August, I lived and worked on two farms: Kaneko's farm and restaurant in mountainous Yamagata Prefecture, and a large family farm on Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost island. The summer opened my eyes to a completely new side of Japan, one that seemed to cling to the vestiges of traditional culture, beating the drum for What Once Was in a universe far removed from modern, cosmopolitan Tokyo's hustle and bustle. At the time, I felt like I had discovered the "real" Japan; naive, sure, but nevertheless, my interest in rural Japan had been ignited.

This is a traditional mountain settlement near where I taught. This farm has most likely belonged to the same family for centuries. I don't know this for sure, but I assume that the current residents are the final generation.

Returning to the U.S., I focused my studies on rural areas and, with my senior thesis on the horizon, began forming a project dealing with rural Japan. With the help of a professor, I began collecting diaries written by rural Japanese during World War II, with plans to study everyday life and the private responses of rural Japanese to the war. The following summer, I returned to rural Japan (this time, to the southern islands of Kyushu and Shikoku, as well as a tiny 60-person island halfway to Okinawa) and completed full translations of three diaries, farming during the day and translating at night. My research on ordinary people and the "everyday" in wartime rural Japan was driven by a realization that despite the large body of work published on war-era Japan, almost none of it paid any attention to ordinary folks in rural areas. With my thesis, I attempted to unearth the buried microhistories of rural farmers, laborers, housewives, children and the elderly and formally acknowledge their historical agency both as individuals and as a group. In history--and, I imagine, in many other fields--scholars have traditionally ignored ordinary citizens and individual actors in favor of large institutions and the elite, passing over rural areas and other geographic and socioeconomic peripheries in favor of privileged urban cores. Many scholars' focuses and approaches to history and other disciplines have begun to shift, but there is still much ground to make up.

It is important to correct this intellectual imbalance; this task is especially urgent today, as the world's rural communities struggle to keep pace with unprecedented demographic, economic, technological, environmental and cultural developments. Much has been made about the new global "urban majority," and the metropole still occupies the majority of our collective focus. In 2008, 82% of Americans lived in urban areas; this figure is certainly impressive, but it overlooks the fact that nearly 60 million Americans currently live in rural areas--a population that still ranks among the top 25 most populous nations in the world. We simply cannot afford to continue ignoring our rural communities.

I participated in a disaster training exercise that involved me being airlifted out of my school in an army helicopter... this is an aerial shot of the valley where I lived for two years (actually the neighboring town, but my town looked like this too). From what I've seen of the rest of Japan, I think this level of development is typical for most rural areas. The Japanese countryside is much more densely populated than in the U.S.

My most recent stint in Japan--which, incidentally, also has close to 60 million rural residents--painted a bleak picture for the future of rural communities worldwide. The region I lived in for two years struggles with geographic isolation, job shortages, a lack of industry, a rapidly shrinking and aging population, environmental degradation, misguided development and public works projects, and an alarming disappearance of its rich cultural heritage. Abandoned homes, schools, and businesses blight the landscape, and historic buildings crumble as they wait for the inevitable wrecking ball. Buildings and services are inaccessible to the elderly, who currently make up nearly half the population--a figure that will soon skyrocket. Infrastructure and planning are outdated, inefficient, and often environmentally harmful. These problems affect not only the small town I lived in, but towns and regional cities across Japan. If this can happen in Japan, one of the wealthiest nations in the world*, then why not in other modern, postindustrial nations--why not here?

This is Chiiori, the 300-year-old mountain farmhouse where I spent my final month in Japan. It was purchased in the 70s by American writer Alex Kerr, and unlike most houses of its kind, it has been preserved in basically its original state. It is still a working farm, and we also ran it as an overnight guesthouse.

The problem is that the issues affecting rural areas in first-world countries often fly under our radar. Riding a sleek, air-conditioned train around glittering Tokyo reveals nothing about the struggles of tiny, forgotten Ichiu, Japan; just as a visit to Minneapolis doesn't tell us what is worrying the good folks in Lake Wobegon. We have to spread the word and get to work. But how does one concerned with the health and prosperity of our rural areas go about alerting the rest of the world? How does one convince the hardcore urbanists of the value of a rural community? How does one convince the pessimists of the incredible opportunities for rural growth and revival and reinvention? And, having finally achieved all of that, how does one make good on those claims? As I enter the next chapter of my studies, I'll certainly be keeping these questions at the front of my mind.

*CIA World Factbook

Andrew Wald has travelled frequently and extensively throughout Japan, and lived in rural Japan from 2008 to 2010. Trained as a historian, he will begin pursuing an M.Arch degree this fall, with hopes to continue research on the development of rural areas. Andrew is a proud, born-and-raised Minnesotan.

Minnesota Main Street hosted its first basic training on August 17-18 at the Indigo Room in Red Wing, MN. MN Main Street, the state coordinating organization for the National Main Street Program, has kicked off their first year with 4 newly Designated Main Street Program Communities and 8 Main Street Associate Member Communities. Over 60 participants attended the first basic training! The training attracted folks from the new Main Street designated communities, associate communities, and some new communities. The two day program was loaded with valuable information on starting and maintaining a successful Main Street program with an equal focus on each aspect of the Main Street Four Point Approach ®: organization, promotion, economic restructuring, and design. The speakers stressed that the Main Street program is a grass roots effort that will mobilize and thrive with support from businesses and residents alike.

The Center for Rural Design applauds MN Main Street's efforts and looks forward to the development of the state and the communities' programs. Rural downtowns are environmental, cultural and economic epicenters that impact and are affected by the surrounding areas and the greater regions. Gaining community support to preserve and enhance downtown areas can get more community members involved in local issues, increase quality of life, and support economic development.

This basic training event is the first step in a series of educational activities that the MN Main Street Program has coordinated for this year. Please visit the MN Main Street website for the most up to date information on the next events and how to get involved.

Tracey Kinney, AICP, Associate ASLA, CRD Research Fellow and MN Main Street Steering Committee Member.