Originally conceived as a gimmick to promote tourism during the city’s 1937 Winter Carnival, the Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues in Bemidji became the second-most-photographed sculptures in the country in the 1940s. The prototypical “roadside colossus” inspired dozens of other Minnesota and Midwest cities to create similar works in the decades that followed.
In 1932, Bemidji teachers and civic leaders organized a simple winter carnival consisting of sporting events surrounding an annual basketball game between St. Cloud Teachers College and a team of local school teachers. This event was repeated only once until January of 1937, when Bemidji Rotarians sponsored construction of an eighteen-foot-tall statue of logging legend Paul Bunyan to launch the return of the winter games.
As Cyril Dickinson and the workers at his lumber company oversaw construction of Paul, Jim Payton (manager of Bemidji Electric Company) was responsible for the construction of his companion: Babe the Blue Ox. Workers built both statues on a three-to-one-scale, using Bemidji Mayor Earl Bucklen and an ox from Headwaters Camp as models. They did not, however, follow that scale while constructing Paul’s neck (lighting was poor during construction), resulting in the appearance of little to no neck at all. Within three weeks, a concrete-and-plaster Paul was installed on the shores of Lake Bemidji (joining the Fireplace of States, constructed in 1934). Babe was more nimble, consisting of a wooden frame wrapped in wire netting covered by wool and canvas. After he was mounted onto a car, he served as the carnival’s mobile ambassador.
Attendance at the four-day sports carnival was bustling, with roughly 15,000 people participating. Babe greeted visitors with a spectacle: auto tail lights shone out of his eyes, and vehicle exhaust poured out of his nostrils to give the appearance of exhaling cold air. Before Babe could tour downtown Bemidji, workers removed his fourteen-foot-wide tin horns so as not to pull down street decorations.
After the event was over, a full-page spread about the statues in Life magazine (February 1, 1937) brought national attention to Bemidji. Babe traveled to the St. Paul Winter Carnival and later the Minnesota State Fair, escorted in all parades by highway patrol and Bemidji Fire Marshal Pete Johnson as designated “bull whacker.” In 1938, 100,000 people attended the Bemidji Winter Carnival. Babe was joined in the parade by a sixteen-foot-long black duck and corresponding rifle crafted by the community of Blackduck (twenty-five miles northeast of Bemidji). Bunyan must have hunted near their town, people joked, with the giant duck as his quarry. The duck was the first in a series of giant statues erected in area towns inspired by the Paul Bunyan legend and the Bemidji statues.
Babe stopped traveling by 1939, with organizers citing damage to the statue as well as the expense. The ox was permanently installed next to Paul on the Bemidji waterfront. There, he overlooked the carnival until that, too, stopped in 1941, as World War II drew attention and resources elsewhere. The statues' fame only grew, however, when they were featured again in Life in 1945. The Eastman Kodak corporation named them the second-most-photographed sculptures in the United States, following Mount Rushmore.
In the 1950s, an amusement park with Bunyan-themed rides was built on fill added between the statues and the lakeshore, and a host of other businesses drew names and inspiration from the logging legends. In 1974, plans to renovate the park highlighted an ongoing tension in the community between natural preservation and commercial development on the city’s lakeshore. Concerns reappeared in the 1990s, when a new tourist information center replaced the original Bunyan house.
In 2015, the City of Bemidji installed a two-foot berm and boulders in front of Paul and Babe to give tourists a better angle for selfie photography. The move sparked community outrage via letters to the editor, Facebook posts, and Twitter discussions using the hashtags #Paulmageddon and #Babeghazi. Citizens opposed to the renovations claimed that new landscaping would crowd the statues and make large-group photography more difficult. Ultimately, the Bemidji city council voted in agreement with them. It cost the city $65,000 to re-do plaza plans, remove 100,000 pounds of boulders, and regrade the plaza to prevent flooding. City Manager Nate Mathews explained, “There’s an emotional connection to that statue. It’s really kind of a sacred place to Bemidjians.”