Cows, Colleges, and Contentment
November 19th, 2004,Here we are in Northfield, a town that welcomes visitors with signs reading “Cows, Colleges, and Contentment.” It’s a long-standing motto, apparently, because it’s on a reproduction of a 1931 historical map of Minnesota that I have hanging on a wall.
The cows–Holstein cows, specifically–are part of the motto because the town was an important dairy center in the nineteenth century. The colleges, meanwhile, are Carleton College and St. Olaf College–two fine private liberal arts colleges. The contentment, um, well, with cows and colleges, who wouldn’t be content?
Northfield is a pleasant town of 18,000, only about 40 miles from Minneapolis and St. Paul. The southern suburbs of the Twin Cities metropolitan area, places like Burnsville, Lakeville, Farmington, and Apple Valley, are nearby and reaching their tentacles this way. Accordingly, the edges of Northfield have an exurban feel, though the town is too old and its downtown too vibrant to be a true outer-edge suburb.
The town is about as historic as any place in the region, even if it’s not very old by East Coast or European standards. It was founded in 1855 by John W. North, a Yankee from New York who built a dam on the Cannon River and used the water to power lumber and flour mills. A picturesque collection of older buildings, many of them from the nineteenth century, makes up the downtown. One of these is the original home of the First National Bank, which Jesse James and his gang attempted to rob on September 7, 1876. The citizens of Northfield fought back and foiled the robbery, killing two gang members. The town now celebrates “The Defeat of Jesse James Days” on the first weekend after Labor Day, complete with a reenactment of the bank raid.
Northfield straddles the Cannon River, which empties into the Mississippi about 25 miles due east. The river forms the heart of the town, and Northfield has done a good job of preserving and developing its riverfront. (See the picture of downtown Northfield at the upper right of this page.) The stone walls along the river and the bridges give the downtown a rather European feel. There is outdoor dining overlooking the river in the warmer months. The east bank rises fairly sharply above the downtown, where Carleton is close by. St. Olaf is on the west side, further from the river; the land slopes gently up to where the college sits at the top of Manitou Hill.
Also on the river downtown is Ames Mill, operated since 1927 by the Malt-o-Meal Company, maker of the hot wheat cereal. The company has been here in Northfield for most of its history, and it has a large distribution and production center right in town making breakfast cereals. Malt-o-Meal gives the town a variety of usually nice aromas. The one we smell most commonly reminds us of chocolate chip cookies. St. Olaf, Malt-o-Meal, and Carleton, in that order, are the town’s three largest employers.
Though the Midwest is not a place of great topographic relief–in other words, it’s pretty flat–the slight hills of Northfield provide some nice vistas. We most commonly see the view from the west side looking toward Carleton and downtown. The older buildings of Carleton, in dark brick and stone, look quite stately from this view, as does downtown. St. Olaf is generally more visible outside of town from a variety of directions, including the south side of town; its limestone buildings, more uniform in style than Carleton’s, look impressive sitting high atop the hill. Also visible from higher points is Carleton’s enormous new windmill, located just east of town and worth a visit.
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I said last week that we would have below-freezing temperatures at night for the rest of the winter, which runs until the end of March, but Mother Nature has proved kinder than that and granted us a longer autumn. The mercury has not fallen below 32 degrees Fahrenheit for almost a week now, and highs are reaching into the fifties. People are wearing t-shirts and marveling at the warmth. Twenty-eight of the last 30 days have been at or above normal temperatures. It shows again just how variable the weather is here.
We are only about a month away from the shortest day of the year. The sun sets now at about 4:45 in the afternoon and rises a little after seven in the morning. On the winter solstice, December 21, the shortest day of the year, sunrise will be at 7:48 and sunset at 4:35–less than nine hours of daylight, a little more if you count dawn and dusk.