Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox

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Paul Bunyan is a National Register of Historic Places entry. That fact alone should stop you — this is a roadside statue built in 1937 to lure motorists off a Minnesota highway, and it carries the same federal designation as Independence Hall. The absurdity is real, and it's part of the point.

Bemidji built Paul and Babe for a winter carnival that opened January 14, 1937, designed as a survival strategy during the long hangover of the Great Depression. The city had prospered on logging and tourism, watched both shrink, and bet on concrete mythology to bring people back. Lennord L. Pitney of Park Rapids drew up the designs. Carl Aldal, a local cement contractor, built Paul. N. Edward Johnson — who owned the Bemidji Boat Factory — built Babe. On opening day, Babe arrived on a Grinols Implement & Fuel Co. truck rigged so exhaust piped out through the ox's nostrils.

Paul stands 18 feet tall. Babe runs 23 feet nose to tail. Neither is subtle. But the statues have survived nearly ninety years of freeze-thaw cycles, a 1-inch crack running the full length of Babe's body from neck to hindquarters — patched annually with caulk and blue paint for years before a 2006 repair project finally stabilized the ground beneath both statues. Kodak once called this pair the second most photographed statues in the United States, behind Mount Rushmore. Whether or not that number holds, the sentiment is durable: something about a giant concrete lumberjack and his blue ox on the edge of a northern lake keeps pulling people in, decade after decade, as stubbornly as the cold.