MN - Minnesota Transportation Sites

HISTORIC TRANSPORTATION SITES IN MINNESOTA

Grand Portage National Monument (Grand Portage)
http://www.nps.gov/grpo/
Grand Portage was an important point in the wide-ranging hub-and-spoke transportation system that was the Great Lakes fur trade.

Stone Arch Bridge (Minneapolis)
http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/about/stonearch.asp
Completed in 1883 by the Great Northern Railway, the Stone Arch Bridge is the only masonry crossing of the Mississippi River. Today the bridge carries a pedestrian/bicycle path between Minneapolis’s west and east banks.

Charles A. Lindbergh Historic Site (Little Falls)
http://www.mnhs.org/places/sites/lh/
The pioneering aviator spent most of his boyhood in this picturesque country house on the Mississippi River.

Aerial Lift Bridge (Duluth)
http://www.duluth.lib.mn.us/History/Bridge.html
Originally opened as a transporter bridge in 1905, this landmark structure was converted to a more conventional lift bridge in 1930. The bridge spans the inlet to the busy Port of Duluth, and opens up to 30 times a day during the shipping season.

James J. Hill House (St. Paul)
http://www.mnhs.org/places/sites/jjhh/
James J. Hill, the “Empire Builder” and founder of the Great Northern Railway, completed this mammoth Romanesque house in 1891 at the height of the Gilded Age. He lived here until his death in 1916.

Stillwater Bridge (Stillwater)
http://www.mnhs.org/places/nationalregister/bridges/nrwasb/nrwasti.html
This vertical lift bridge, spanning the St. Croix River, opened in 1931. Still in use, it is a rare surviving example of an early highway lift span.

Split Rock Lighthouse (Two Harbors)
http://www.mnhs.org/places/sites/srl/
Built atop a bluff on Lake Superior’s western shore in 1910, this light station remains one of Minnesota’s best-known landmarks. Operated today as a living history museum, the site offers a glimpse of a lightkeeper’s life at a remote station in the 1920s.

Greyhound Bus Museum (Hibbing)
http://www.greyhoundbusmuseum.org/
Today’s Greyhound Lines traces its origin to a single bus that ferried miners between Hibbing and Alice, Minnesota. The company is commemorated in a museum that houses 13 historic busses dating from 1914 to 1982.

Seventh Street Improvement Arches (St. Paul)
http://www.mnhs.org/places/nationalregister/bridges/nrrassa/nrraseve.html
This 1884 bridge, built to carry St. Paul’s Seventh Street across the St. Paul and Duluth Railway, is one of the few skewed, helicoidal masonry bridges ever built in the United States.

St. Anthony Falls Bridge (Minneapolis)
http://projects.dot.state.mn.us/35wbridge/index.html
Completed in 2008, this bridge carries I-35W across the Mississippi River. Its predecessor collapsed into the river on August 1, 2007, killing 13 people and injuring another 145. The collapse prompted a nationwide re-evaluation of the state of our aging transportation infrastructure.