Minnesota Fun and/or Interesting Tidbits

Just for the fun of it ~

Do any of you know any fun or interesting facts, stories, or tidbits about Minnesota? A town, an establishment of some kind, tourist attraction, even something that's totally nonsense, etc.? If so, please share.

Here's one about the World's Largest Boot.

The World's Largest Boot sits in downtown Red Wing, Minnesota, inside the flagship Red Wing Shoe Store, and it exists purely as a birthday present a company built for itself. Charles H. Beckman founded Red Wing Shoe Company in 1905, believing that good boots weren't enough on their own, they had to be built the right way, using quality leather and genuine craftsmanship rather than shortcuts. That philosophy carried the company through a full century in business, and when Red Wing hit its 100th anniversary in 2005, it marked the occasion in the most literal way imaginable: by building an actual boot big enough to make the news.

The boot itself is a scaled-up replica of Red Wing's most iconic model, the classic style #877, built using the exact same materials and design as the real thing, just massively oversized. It stands roughly 16 to 20 feet tall depending on the measurement, stretches 20 feet long, and was constructed from the hides of around 80 cows, with more than 80 pounds of brass used just for the eyelets. The finished size comes out to a genuinely absurd 638½ D, a number that immediately earned it a Guinness World Record as the World's Largest Boot, and it's officially been billed as too big even for the Statue of Liberty to wear.

The boot lives inside the Red Wing Shoe Museum, a free exhibit built right into the company's flagship retail store, where visitors can also walk through more than a century of company history, including WWII-era Skytrooper boots, a virtual tour of the manufacturing process, and original advertising illustrations created for the brand by Norman Rockwell. The boot occasionally makes outdoor appearances for parades and local events, but mostly stays put indoors, giving visitors an easy photo op alongside a piece of footwear built at a scale nobody could actually wear.

More than two decades after its debut, and 120 years after Beckman first opened his doors in the same small Minnesota town, Red Wing Shoe Company remains family owned and still headquartered exactly where it started. The giant boot has become something closer to a permanent local landmark than a passing centennial gimmick, a genuinely oversized monument to a company that's built its entire reputation on taking boots seriously, even when it decided to build one nobody could ever put on.