Published: May 30, 2008 04:08 pm            

Back Roads: Sounds of the past

Originally published in the May 30, 2008, print edition.

It’s quiet now at Old Wadena County Park northwest of Staples.

On any spring, or early summer, evening a visitor can sit on a picnic bench, listen to the pines whisper and watch the Crow Wing River wind its way through the forest toward the Mississippi.

Visitors can hike and read the interpretive signs for the trees and shrubs along the trail: thorn apple, white pine, pin oak, box elder, choke cherry, burr oak, prickly ash and others.

If you visit Old Wadena for long you won’t just hear the chatter of the red squirrels and blue jays. You will hear a distant train wail. The sound will come from Staples not many miles distant. That sound and its distance are a historical clue. There was a time when a dreamer named Gus Aspinwall hoped to stand here, in Old Wadena, and not only hear but see the train rattling by.

Aspinwall was no fool.

People had been coming to this hill overlooking this river for centuries before he platted out an imaginary town in 1859.

Native Americans had shed blood here where the Partridge River meets the Crow Wing. Later, fur traders rested here. When Aspinwall built his ferry crossing and set up a small post office, Red River ox carts were still making their river crossing here by the hundreds. They were laden with trade goods and this busy crossing seemed like a fine place for the railroad.

Aspinwall was wrong by about four miles.

The creak and groan of ox carts, the yell of the ferryman and the Ojibway war whoop faded into the silence of history. And the train can only be heard in the distance.

But every mid-August Old Wadena rises again. It has, in recent years, been the site for one of Minnesota’s finest folk music festivals. It has also been the site of the annual Wadena Fur Traders re-enactment. There are buck skin clad fur traders, knife throwing and archery contests, fire eating, fry bread eating, guitar and banjo playing, a trading post and more.

Silence takes a back seat to boisterousness under the pine and oak for two days. Then the silence returns again like a gift for the camper, canoeist or casual visitor who finds their way to this old beautiful place.

If you want to find out more about Old Wadena, visit the park or www.wadenarendezvous.org.

        

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