Grand Meadow Chert Quarry, an ancient Dakota mining site, opens to the public

GRAND MEADOW, MINN. – An ancient Dakota quarry is about to become a new privately maintained trail in southeast Minnesota.

The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry, or the Wahni Yukan in Dakota — so named for the type of flint Indigenous people mined there over thousands of years — will officially open on Tuesday.

There won’t be a big celebration, according to Tom Trow, a retired archaeologist who helped identify the site in 1980. The trail, off a dirt road at 730th Avenue just north of 255th Street and the St. Finbarrs Cemetery, is in Grand Meadow, with farms all around.

“This is a working farm road,” Trow said. “We don’t want to make a big fuss and disturb our neighbors.”

The trail spans about three-fourths of a mile and weaves its way through large pits — some 10 feet deep and 40 feet wide — with signs along the trail as well as benches and a gathering circle with stone seats.

The waymarks are written in English and Dakota, with information about the history of the quarry and what experts speculate may have taken place there.

Volunteers have worked on the trail for more than five years since Trow and the Mower County Historical Society contacted the Prairie Island Indian Community to kickstart the project.

From there, volunteers ranging from Grand Meadow High School students to classes at Carleton College and other universities came to clear out buckthorn and shape up the trail.

Inmates through the Minnesota Department of Corrections’ Sentencing to Service program have been at the site once or twice a week over the past five years as well, Trow said.

Prairie Island officials reached out to several tribes across Minnesota as part of the project, which included translating the trail signs and picking out landmarks, including a grandfather tree to offer prayers.

They also came up with the quarry’s name, Wanyi Yukan, which means “there is chert here,” in keeping with the traditional way Dakota named locations.

The trail includes prairie land to the south, as well as parking. Tribes have access to the prairie for gatherings, and the Mower County Historical Society hopes to organize special Indigenous Day events at the area.

“We feel it’s important to recognize the people who came before us,” said Randy Forster, the society’s executive director.

The site won’t be staffed, but there will be security cameras and vandalism prevention methods in place should anyone try to damage the property. A fund has been set up to maintain the property in the future; fundraisers and future donations are welcome.

Archaeologists say the site dates back millennia, with its heyday about 600 to 1,000 years ago.

It went dormant around the 1400s as the quarry was tapped out and Dakota people adapted agricultural practices, and was largely forgotten. White settlers who came to the area filled in most of the pits to create more farmland, but one family preserved their land to create their own wooded hunting area.

In 1952, farmer Maynard Green wrote to the Minnesota Historical Society asking them to inspect the property. His family had found hundreds of Native American artifacts for years, he wrote, and he suspected the 5 wooded acres on his land was significant in some way.

Green actually invited an archaeologist to Grand Meadow at one point, but he made an error — he showed the archaeologist other sites first. By the time they got around to the quarry site, a storm was approaching and the expert begged off to head home and beat the weather.

Green’s letter sat dormant until 1980, when a statewide surveying team led by Trow came to the area.

“The state archaeologist at the time had inherited the files, and he pulled out this letter and said, ‘… Go see this guy, he’s been waiting a long time,’” Trow said. “Maynard was pretty surprised when I called him up.”

From there, Trow and the team surprised archaeologists around the state with radar images of the 88 pits remaining, proving they couldn’t have naturally occurred. Experts speculate there could have been as many as 2,000 pits at one time.

The Archaeological Conservancy, a nonprofit that preserves dig sites, bought the property in 1994 after advocates tried and failed to get the Minnesota Legislature to buy the land.

Trow said he’d like to see more educational opportunities at the trail, from field trips to a potential documentary to showcase how important the site is.

“This was probably a culturally significant space the likes of which we don’t typically see in Minnesota,” Trow said. “We’re only now discovering how special this place is.”