Old Crow Wing

Old Crow Wing was the town the oxcarts built and the railroad killed. The confluence of the Crow Wing and Mississippi had been a meeting place for millennia — Dakota, then Ojibwe — before fur traders made it a post in the 1770s and Allan Morrison's 1823 trading post made it permanent. When the Woods Trail was cut through Ojibwe country in 1844 to keep the Red River trade safe from Dakota conflict, Crow Wing became the principal supply station on the Winnipeg–St. Paul route.

The heyday was real — 600-plus people in the 1860s, stores and warehouses and three churches, the 25-cent ferry across the Mississippi, Hole-in-the-Day II's town and the depot for the Ojibwe trade, the place where northbound wagons switched to carts and southbound oxcarts switched to wagons. The Northern Pacific crossed the Mississippi at Brainerd instead in 1871 and Crow Wing simply faded — the foremost trading center of the region reduced to a ghost town inside a state park.

What remains is the best kind of ghost town — the prairie depressions where the town stood, the interpretive trail down Main Street's ghost, the cemetery and the river still meeting where the Métis cart brigades once forded. Crow Wing State Park keeps the site as a National Register district — the town that died when the railroad chose a different crossing, preserved in the shape of its absence.

Old Crow Wing is the archive's oxcart file — the 1860s Mississippi trade town that the 1844 Woods Trail fed and the 1871 railroad bypass emptied, now a National Register ghost town inside a state park.