Who Is Albert Lea and Why Did They Name This Place After Him, Huh?

[mallorys_camera]

JUMP: Hayfield, MN → New Richland, MN – Next to American Legion: 40 miles
STRAIGHT out of the school grounds where we came in…Arrows back to LEFT onto HWY 30 WEST
Follow HWY 30 WEST to New Richland… arrows to a very tight lot
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

Town of New Richland so depressed they couldn’t even afford a marker pointing to the downtown. Not that it would have mattered – I think every single one of its storefronts except two were empty.

Also a townie screamed at me when I took the dogs out after the Jump. “Don’t let those animals go to the bathroom in our park!”

(I always get a kick out of that “go to the bathroom” – like the dogs travel with miniature canine commodes which they whip out and sit down upon whenever duty calls)

I smiled at the woman, held up a plastic bag. I never leave home without one. Long time readers of this journal may remember I always used to pick up trash whenever I walked around Monterey. Guess what? I’m in Minnesota and I still do. If it was an – er – unusual habit in California, it’s grounds for commitment to Lake Wobegond Asylum for the Criminally Insane here in the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes.)

At the sight of the plastic bag, the woman grew practically apoplectic. “You think if you pick it up that makes it all right?” she hissed. “It doesn’t.”

Well, gee, lady, I thought. Dunno what to tell you. If a dog’s gotta shit, a dog’s gotta shit.

I wondered why she was so angry. Was it personal? Was she reacting to the fact I was connected to the circus? Does she think circus folks are like carnies, crooks and thieves, geeks and scoundrels, whose only purpose in life is to lift her wallet and desecrate her grass? (Say lady – if I didn’t have a dog, I’d shit on your lawn myself.) Or was this a kind of road rage sparked by the hopeless economy?

In either case, it left me with very little interest in checking out New Richland. (New Rich Land – hah!) so I got in my little red Veedub and drove 20 miles to the city of Albert Lea.

Which I found amazingly interesting. Although probably no one else on the planet would. And of course it didn’t have an espresso bar (the main reason I drove there.) They don’t seem to drink a whole lot of espresso in this part of Minnesota which I find rather odd since there were certainly café’s aplenty north and west of here. I blame the proximity to the Iowa.

Not so very long ago Albert Lea was a very prosperous city. It had an opera house. It had banks. It had a Woman’s College. A lot of industry and manufacturing was based here – it was once the headquarters for what’s now the largest privately owned company in the United States∗.

Left photograph in the pair above was taken in 1940. You’re still looking at a street that makes sense as a business venue, that hasn’t degenerated into a hodgepodge of junk shops, chiropractors, bars, wacky storefront evangelical churches.

Right photograph this afternoon from more or less the same spot shows an almost apocalyptic meltdown of the local economy. Part of it, I suppose, was the food processing plant that burned down in 2003 taking 750 jobs with it. (For a town of less than 20,000, that’s a significant number of jobs.)

That’s only seventy years. That’s not that long.

Anyway, I walked around for several hours entertaining myself by cataloging the arcane ornamentation of the old architectural derelicts and making up stories – there’s this Philip Marlowe-like detective, right? And he’s looking for someone who committed a crime seventy years ago – maybe the guy was a Nazi spy, I don’t know. Ur-Marlowe will receive some vast sum of money if he can bring the perp in, liver spots, leaky prostate and all. Only he can’t find a trace of the perp except then, one night, the forlorn derelict little town …changes... back into the town it was in 1940. (Marlowe is actually entering it through the dreams of an old lady who lays dying in Albert Lea’s satellite Mayo clinic.) Repurposed Tom’s Midnight Garden, dontcha know…

Albert Lea has the big terroir. That’s why I like it.

∗ In 1870 W. W. Cargill moved to Albert Lea so that his fledgling grain elevator and warehouse business could take advantage of the expanding railroad system. One hundred and fifty years later Cargill has diversified into the production and distribution of a staggering assortment of agricultural products – that Egg McMuffin you had this morning? Cargill. The company is now headquartered in Minneapolis.

Comments

[sfo2lhr.livejournal.com]

Always wondered about Albert Lea. Thanks especially for the then-and-now photos - I love those.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Albert Lea was the surveyor who mapped this part of southern Minnesota.

I love those.

Me too!

[ch.livejournal.com]

I had guessed 3M, not Cargill.

[mallorys-camera.livejournal.com]

Grain elevators trump post-its every day of the week!

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

Wonder what happened to the intriguing dome on the building at the left. Dogs carrying commodes--that's a nice picture too. I always pick up after Buddy, even in places where no one else picks up after their dogs. Even so, I get falsely accused of leaving poop on the ground far too often.