Serious Sanji Is Coming to Apple Valley

It just got its liquor license approved — wine and beer, no hard liquor — and it's still under construction at the Time Square Shopping Center.

You drive past the bluffs every day. Highway 61 south of St. Paul. The Minnesota River valley from Mendota to Shakopee. Those walls of tan and gray rock rising above the floodplain forests.

Most people see scenery. But those bluffs are 450 million years old. And for the first hundred years of Minnesota history, they weren't scenery at all.

They were building material.

THE SEA BENEATH YOUR FEET

Four hundred fifty million years ago, Minnesota sat near the equator under a shallow tropical sea. The water teemed with shellfish, corals, and creatures called brachiopods and trilobites. When they died, their shells sank to the bottom. Layer after layer. Century after century. The weight of all that death compressed the shells into stone.

The sea retreated. The stone stayed.

Then, 11,000 years ago, a glacial lake the size of Hudson Bay drained through here. Glacial River Warren was a torrent of meltwater far larger than any river on Earth today. It carved the Minnesota River valley in a geologic instant, slicing through those ancient layers and exposing hundreds of feet of limestone and dolomite along the bluffs.

The rock just sat there. For thousands of years, it was sacred ground for the Dakota, who knew the confluence of the rivers as Bdote. Then the U.S. Army showed up.

And they needed to build a fort.

THE FIRST QUARRY

In 1820, Colonel Josiah Snelling arrived at the bluff above where the Minnesota meets the Mississippi. He had orders to build a permanent military outpost. He looked down at his feet and saw the answer.

Platteville limestone. Gray, rough, full of fossils. It breaks easily along natural layers, which makes it simple to quarry. And there was a massive deposit of it right where Snelling wanted to build.

For five years, enlisted men, paid civilians, and enslaved people hauled stone from the bluff. They shaped it by hand. They stacked it into walls. By 1825, Fort Snelling stood on the cliff: a diamond-shaped fortress with round towers, barracks, and officers' quarters.

It remains the largest complex of Platteville limestone structures ever built.

The soldiers didn't know they were setting a pattern. But every major building in early Minnesota would follow the same logic: look at the bluff, find the rock, and start cutting.

THE STONE TOWNS

Just across the river from Fort Snelling, the fur trade outpost of Mendota was growing. Henry Sibley arrived in 1834 to manage the American Fur Company's operations. By 1836, he'd built himself a house from limestone pulled from the nearby bluffs. It still stands. It's the oldest private residence in Minnesota.

Jean-Baptiste Faribault built his house three years later, in 1839. For the facade facing the river, workers quarried sandstone from a small island two miles upstream. That island, now called Quarry Island, still has tool marks visible on its rock faces. Today it sits in Gun Club Lake in Mendota Heights, beneath the roar of MSP Airport runways, accessible only by canoe.

In 1853, the Church of St. Peter went up on the bluff above Mendota. Limestone walls. It's the oldest continuously used church in Minnesota.

The same story played out in Hastings. William LeDuc built his Gothic Revival mansion in the 1860s with limestone walls three feet thick. The Dakota County Courthouse followed in 1871, constructed from 40 railcars of cut blue limestone hauled by rail from Faribault. The walls are 28 inches thick, covered with brick veneer. Most people think it's a brick building. It's not. It's stone.

THE KILNS AND THE QUARRIES

Limestone wasn't just for buildings. Burned in a kiln, it becomes quickite powder used for mortar, plaster, and fertilizer. And in the 1840s, kilns started appearing along the river.

The Grey Cloud Lime Kiln went up around 1846 on a backwater of the Mississippi near what's now Cottage Grove. Thirty-five feet tall. Twenty feet around. Three arched portals at the base for loading wood. Workers hauled limestone from nearby bluffs by horse and wagon, dumped it in from the top, and let it burn for days. The powder was packed into barrels and shipped to farms across the region.

William B. Cowan operated the kiln from 1873 until 1902. It made the National Register of Historic Places. And in 2014, after years of flooding, it collapsed.

Other quarries dotted the bluffs. In the 1880s, A.H. and S.J. Truax operated a limestone quarry at what's now Spring Lake Park Reserve, cutting stone from the 150-foot bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. When Lock and Dam No. 2 was built in the 1930s, the reservoir flooded some of those old quarry sites. They're still down there, underwater.

THE ONE THAT'S STILL RUNNING

Most of the old quarries are gone. Parks now. Underwater. Collapsed.

But one is still operating.

Bryan Rock Products started in Red Wing in 1941, supplying agricultural lime. In 1949, they acquired a permanent quarry in Shakopee. The stone there is different from anywhere else: a reddish-colored limestone from the Oneota Dolomite formation, 485 million years old. It became a favorite for landscaping and baseball fields.

Today, Bryan Rock's Shakopee quarry can produce 15,000 tons of limestone per shift. They're the leading producer of ball diamond aggregate in the country. Stone from the same ancient seabed that built the first forts and courthouses is now under the infield dirt at ballparks across America.

9975 194th St W, Lakeville

➡️ 5 bed, 5 bath, 1.4 acres
➡️ Open-concept main level with spacious kitchen & large island
➡️ Lower level built-in bar & open living/game space
➡️ 3-car attached garage, deck & hardwood floors

Price: $1,525,000

MLS#: 7059485

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