The Wake

Once upon a time (in mid-August) in a far, far away place (Rosemount) the University gave away free corn on the cob, lemonade and tastes of local wine to all. The setting: a mysterious 7,500 acre park 30 miles from the St. Paul Campus, dubbed UMORE, or University of Minnesota Outreach, Research and Education Park.

The park’s forte is agricultural field research, and “3,500 acres have been devoted to agricultural research for the last 55 years,” says Jim Rowe, assistant director of operations for UMore. On August 17, UMore looked beyond those 55 years, hosting its third annual open house – sharing the past, present and future of the largest publicly owned research and educational facility in the United States at an urban-rural interface.

“It is an effort to show our neighboring community some of the activity at this Research and Outreach Center,” Rowe says. Open house-goers also participated in various garden classes, haywagon rides and heard live music. Kids climbed up tractors, and saw live raptor and insect exhibits.

At present approximately 3,500 acres of rural pastures, rows of corn, soybeans and barnyards provide a crop and livestock research site, at which over 50 St. Paul Campus faculty and students work on a typical summer day, Rowe says. “There are daily visitors from the surrounding communities” to UMore, Rowe explains. UMore is between Rosemount and Empire townships, and offers programs for the general public. Rowe says attractions include horseback riding with a stable near the park renting horses, hiking and cross-country skiing through UMore’s 11-mile Lone Rock Trail. One might see white-tailed deer, wild turkeys, foxes or pheasants on the trail, UMore Park’s brochure claims. The Master Gardener Education and Research Display Garden, planted and maintained by volunteers, is also open daily from sunrise to sunset for the public to visit and gather ideas about gardening and landscaping. The garden also offers regular classes.

The rest of the campus is leased commercially to help fund the university’s research agenda. Tenants include locals like area farmers and the Dakota County Gun Club. The University of Minnesota Police Department has firing ranges on the property and the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments keep bomb squad facilities on the land, director of operations Phil Larsen explained to open house visitors.

Amidst the country charm of UMore - silohs, lush grasslands, rolling hills, woodlands, and wild animals - inhabits a curious industrial air. Towering smokestacks and strange concrete structures hint towards the park’s unique history. Maureen Bouchard, of the Rosemount Area Historical Society, spoke at the open house about the site’s past as Gopher Ordnance Works, a United States Army munitions plant built during World War II, in 1942. Following the end of the war, the University submitted a proposal to the War Assets Administration and in 1947, acquired the land for use as a research center to study aerodynamics, among other things. The proposal’s eventual approval made it the largest single expansion in the University’s history, according to John Lauber’s Land in Transition: A History of UMore Park.

One of the University’s first endeavors at the site was housing polio patients. Faced with a shortage of hospital beds caused by the epidemic in 1946, the Medical School converted the GOW infirmary into a long-term care hospital for polio patients, who were previously held at Fort Snelling, explains Land in Transition.

Prior to serving as a federal plant for white smokeless gun powder, the area now known as UMore Park, was home to over 80 farm families, Bouchard said. Many families were given as little as six weeks to relocate, and the U.S. War Department provided nothing to help the families move or become reestablished, according to Land in Transition The plant proved less necessary than predicted, and 5,000 acres were sold back to farmers in 1943.

Long before the farmer’s had been kicked out, in the mid 1850’s, farmers kicked someone else out – the Mdewakanton band of Dakota Indians. Tribal leaders were reluctant to give up the rich land, but the settlers (mostly Irish, fleeing the potato famine) won out, according to Land in Transition. The University became involved with these farmers early, teaching them new farming methods when their one-crop system began depleting the soil.

UMore Park, with its diverse and revolving past, has still yet to find its happy ending. The parcel’s days of soybeans and hiking trails may one day seem as unfamiliar as its days as a wartime gunpowder factory. As the University prepares to transform into one of the top three public research universities in the world, through the Strategic Positioning process, UMore Park will also undergo changes.

Sasaki Associates Inc., of Watertown Mass., hired to examine the future of UMore, will deliver their recommendations for future uses of the property to the University in late November.

Larry Laukka, executive director for UMore Park, speculated at the open house that because of an “encroachment of urban living around the area, things will have to be different.” He says, “New modern research may be exchanged for ag research, but it will be a long time coming.”

“It’s a unique piece of property… there are some great things that can happen with it.”