There was a morning when residents of Houston, Minn., looked up to see the word “HOKAH” in huge white letters on the hillside above town. Another morning, the letters spelled “TOOLBOX,” the nickname of a Houston schoolteacher. The lettering originally spelled “HOUSTON,” and most mornings it did.
The 24-foot-high, 14-foot-wide letters were originally arranged with local surface rocks by the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC). During the Great Depression era, those otherwise unemployed workers completed many tasks in or near Houston as also occurred all over the nation. The CCC camp 3710 just west of Houston and one in Caledonia were established within a day or two of each other in June 1933.
The “HOUSTON” on the steep pasture on an unnamed hillside, overlooking the city and the Root River, was intended to be a landmark for small aircraft. After the New Deal program ended in 1942, maintenance – including frequent whitewashing – became a decades-long project of local boy scouts and girl scouts.
Later on, older youth engaged in creative rock rearranging. “Once they found out they could do it, it became the thing to do,” said lifelong Houston resident Ron Carlson. It was way too often, too tempting for too many to engage in late-night spelling pranks while – it was said – enjoying a chilled brewed beverage.
Karla Bloem, Executive Director of the International Owl Center, has accumulated a lengthy list of words and numbers that have adorned the hillside, indicating trespassing spellers came from Houston as well as neighboring, rival burgs. Sunrise surprise spellings included Harmony, Rushford, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Elmerton, Hey Zeke, Hey Skip, Hey Huge, Hey Dave, Hoedown, horse, stoned and numerous graduation year numerals. According to Carlson, there were also several off-color spellings that elicited immediate attention by the city.
After each of the many periodic rearrangements, volunteers would go up and “correct” the spelling. Houston resident Ron Evenson said the clincher came when some rocks were rolled down the hill. He noted “It was not fun” replacing the letters that time.
Ultimately, it was too often an occurrence for the Chamber of Commerce, which in 1985, made the original spelling permanent by covering the rocks with concrete. From the quarry parking lot, volunteers used wheelbarrows to transfer the concrete about 20 yards and then pour it into forms of hand-held boards around each letter.
Carlson recalls it being a formidable task on a very warm autumn day for the workers, including some ladies. There was water to drink, but nobody brought food. Evenson said it was a full day of work for approximately 30 volunteers. Afterward, he thought the letters looked better with the new straight edges, not as ragged with vegetation no longer growing among the rocks.
Not visible from the valley, there was a last-minute, impromptu, personalized memorial to those volunteers, who at the end of the day, left their initials, handprints, names or nicknames in a slab of leftover concrete.
The letters on are on private property. Between the “O” and the “U” is a barbed-wire fence that separates the property of two different landowners. That detail and the initials in the concrete are only visible from close range, an opportunity that has been available once a year for an estimated 15 to 20 summers.
Bloem began conducting annual Hoedown Days tours to the letters when she was the director and naturalist at the Houston Nature Center. The landowners would mow the site – a pasture on the bluff prairie, also known as a “goat prairie.” Volunteer responders would remove any rattlesnakes prior to the weekend. Explaining that it is usually too hot on the hillside for snakes by that time of year, Bloem does not recall any reptiles being relocated during pre-tour preparation.
One does not need to be a mountain climber, as the tour mostly entails a caravan of cars up to the quarry parking area, a short walk away from the letters. There have been years when 50 to 100 visitors enjoyed the tour. But like many other annual celebrations, Hoedown Days and the tour have been canceled during the pandemic summer of 2020.
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