Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox
Built for a winter carnival that opened on January 14, 1937, and never taken down. Babe started as a parade float on a truck chassis, plumbed so the exhaust came out of the ox's nostrils. They are the oldest surviving pair of their kind and the National Register listed them in 1988.
Field Guide Entry
Bemidji built a Paul Bunyan for its first Winter Carnival, which opened on January 14, 1937. Lennord Pitney designed him and Carl Aldal, a cement worker in town, built him: 18 feet of concrete over a frame, in a plaid shirt, standing on the shore of Lake Bemidji.
Exhaust through the nostrils
Babe was not built to stand still. N. Edward Johnson, who ran a boat factory in town, made the ox as a parade float and mounted it on a truck from Grinols Implement, with the exhaust routed out through the nostrils so it steamed in the cold. The float toured to advertise the carnival. In 1939, Babe was set down beside Paul on the lakeshore and stayed there.
Listed
The National Register of Historic Places added the pair on March 10, 1988, under reference 88000204. Registers do not usually take roadside statues. The nomination rested on age: every other giant Bunyan in the country, and the ones in Maine as well, came later, which leaves these two as the surviving originals of a form that spread across the northern states after the war.
Both were restored in 2022. Babe was lifted 15 inches onto a new footing, because runoff from a plaza built in 2015 had been freezing and thawing around the hooves and breaking the concrete apart.
They stand in front of the tourist information center, which keeps a case of oversized objects presented as Paul's belongings.
Visiting Information
Free, outdoors, and open at any hour, on the Lake Bemidji shore with parking beside them. The tourist information center behind the statues keeps daytime hours and holds the collection of oversized objects, along with the local highway and carnival material.
The lakefront path runs past them, and the pair works as the town's gathering point as much as a photo stop, so there is usually something happening around them through the summer. Winter is the season they were built for, and the wind coming off the lake is the main thing to dress for.
Paul Bunyan Park has restrooms and picnic tables in season. Brainerd and Akeley both have Bunyans of their own within a 2 hour drive for anyone collecting them.
Field Gallery
No approved field photos yet. You could be first.
Community Notes
No community notes yet.
Explore More Mysteries
Catedral de Justo
Justo Gallego Martínez laid the first stone on October 12, 1961, and worked on the building for 60 years with no drawings, no training as an architect or a builder, and no permit. He died on November 28, 2021, at 96. The building has still never been licensed or consecrated.
Centralia Mine Fire
The Centralia Mine Fire was first reported on May 27, 1962, the Sunday before Memorial Day, in an old strip-mine pit the borough used as its dump. The fire got into the abandoned workings of the Buck Mountain coal bed and is still burning. Congress appropriated $42 million to buy out and move the town, and Pennsylvania estimates the fire could burn for more than 100 years if left alone.
Coral Castle
Edward Leedskalnin, a Latvian immigrant, began carving oolite limestone in 1923, then spent years moving the whole project, with stones of over 21 tons, to land he bought in Homestead in 1936. He credited only the secrets of the pyramids and the laws of weight and leverage, and photographs that surfaced later show tripods, winches, and pulleys at the site.
Bishop Castle
Jim Bishop was 15 in 1959 when $450 he had saved went toward a mountain lot beside the San Isabel National Forest. In June 1969, he and his father began a one-room stone cottage there, and from 1973 he turned it into a castle, building alone and without blueprints until 2019. He died on November 21, 2024, at 80. His son Daniel keeps it free to enter, and in July 2026 the Aspen Acres fire burned to within about 200 yards of it.