Little Falls, Minnesota

The name comes from the river itself. Where the Mississippi once dropped over an outcrop of slate and granite, the Ojibwe called the spot Kakabikans — roughly, "the little squarely cut-off rock." When Lieutenant Zebulon Pike passed through in 1805 he noted "a remarkable rapid in the river, opposite a high piny island." French mapmaker Joseph Nicollet later recorded it as petites chutes. Those small falls are gone now, drowned beneath the pool of the dam that stands in their place, but they gave the town its name and its reason to exist.

Three things shaped Little Falls more than anything else: the river, the lumber it carried, and one family that grew rich milling it. The Pine Tree Lumber Company, run by Charles Weyerhaeuser and Drew Musser, opened here in the 1890s and nearly doubled the town's population in a decade. The dam that stored their logs still generates electricity. And a farm just south of town produced the century's most famous aviator, whose boyhood home is now a National Historic Landmark.

Today Little Falls is a walkable county seat with a downtown historic district, a state park, several genuinely good museums, and two festivals that anchor the local calendar. Use the guides below to plan a visit or read the history behind the place.