Mounds and Beacon, Looking East (07.26.23)

Our apartment faces east from downtown Saint Paul, and the summer sunrise pours in, bringing a fine long view of the Mississippi curving southward toward New Orleans, with high bluffs on its eastern shore. It’s a landscape, a riverscape, of geology and sky and history, of trains and an historic airport, topped by burial mounds and a land-based lighthouse.

By some quirky domestic geometry, an accidentally perfect relationship of bluff, apartment, and windowsill height, when I am lying in bed at night and the city has fallen dark, a distant rotating light of red and white appears just at my eyeline, rhythmic and steady. I look at it when I’m falling asleep. It’s the Mounds Park Airway Beacon, fascinating in itself, and built in a place of powerful presence. Bureaucratic language is not always descriptive or even respectful (!), but here, from its website,  “The Indigenous burial ground that is currently called “Indian Mounds Regional Park” has been a sacred site and place of burial for over a thousand years. It is significant to living Indigenous Peoples as a cemetery where their ancestors are buried. It is a place of reverence, remembrance, respect, and prayer.” 

It is good to read that acknowledgement in the official government language of the city. It also makes one wonder about the intersection of the ancient burial mounds with the erection in 1929 of the Beacon, right in the middle of the series of mounds perched blufftop. Wouldn’t the beacon have needed an excavation? Footings? Might the digging have interfered with the cemetery? I saw nothing of this in the contemporaneous newspaper record. The Indian Mounds Cultural Landscape Study and Messaging Plan notes the Beacon was built “on top of a mound” and some electrical lines intruded into “some of the mounds”. Desecration.

Between 1923 and 1933, some 600 beacons were built across this country, as an aid to early aviation pilots trying to find their day-and-night way from airport to airport by looking down at the ground as they flew. 110 feet tall, crowned by a 24” mirror that flashes every ten seconds; it is said to be visible for forty miles.  The beacon installations included huge concrete arrows set into the ground, and painted bright yellow, signaling ‘this way’ to those pilots peering down in all kinds of weather and light. One such arrow, 70 feet long and pointing to Holman Field, is still in Cottage Grove, though its companion beacon tower was taken down in 1954.

 A national flight system, and certainly night flight aspirations, were partially driven by the postal service and its airmail, which at one point used a system of bonfires to guide pilots after dark. (When the mail could remain airborne for the duration, it cut the delivery time to 35 hours coast to coast, beating the fastest transcontinental trains by three days.) Note to self: stories of early flight navigation are fascinating and plentiful. I read of a pre-night flight method in which the mail was carried by day in a plane landing at dusk near a railway station. The train carried it overnight to another station, where a day pilot picked it up and flew onward. 

Other technologies soon superseded the usefulness of the airway beacons; ironically, radio navigation was coming in as it was being built. Local historian and east side mainstay Steve Trimble has written: “Air travel was starting to become important in the twenties…people were fascinated by the development of flight…according to a newspaper article, ‘during the summer months large crowds of onlookers throng the bluffs overlooking the airport.’”

The Saint Paul beacon is among the last of its kind. Trimble reports that the Smithsonian wanted it, but the community said no. Our Airway Beacon became a neighborhood landmark, deemed worthy of renovation and repainting in 1994, and noted by a mayoral candidate who vowed to climb it after election. And for years, the Beacon was at the center of an annual April Fools tradition in the neighborhood paper, being variously reported due to be replaced by the old 3M water tower, or to be topped by a Weatherball found in a scrapyard. One proposal sketched enormous banners to be hung from the tower asking pilots to be quiet after 10 pm. In 2008, the Dayton’s Bluff District Forum “The Voice of the Community” (and a fine one) reported, straight-faced, that the Beacon had been accidentally sold on Ebay and its new owners would be using it to project huge digital advertisements on the bluffs and on downtown buildings. 

The biggest news story about the intersection of aviation and the neighborhood, though, concerned the 1929 crash of a Northwest Airlines tri-motor passenger and mail plane, taking off from Holman Field, which lost power and came down on the bluff.  The veteran pilot died, but all seven passengers survived with injuries. Neighbors ran to help when the plane hit the bluff and caught fire. A newspaper photo shows several hundred people viewing the wreckage.

I can testify that it is a long uphill bike ride from downtown to the Beacon, and that the shade of the Park is welcome, and mounds still rise solemnly to look over the river and the valley. Signage reminds visitors that they are in a cemetery. Steve Trimble can be persuaded to tell neighborhood stories. There’s an eagle cam up there, whose occupant can sometimes be seen from the bluff, floating. Off to the east and below lie the fields and runways of Holman Field where, once, pilots from Chicago landed with the mail, having used arrows and beacon towers and the winding Mississippi to find their way.

Holman Field has more than 41,000 annual landings and takeoffs.  Many of them seem to float exactly along a 28th floor altitude, across my east window. The field’s 1939 terminal building still stands, housing a fine dining restaurant with deck tables adjoining the runway. I have happened to be there when a small plane pulled up for dinner. And when you leave the restaurant to descend the broad steps toward your car, and look up, the Airway Beacon is above you and flashing. Imagine that throng of people up there in the twenties, watching the miracle of flight at the downtown airport. Measure the height of that bluff and give a thought to the night flight pilots who followed lights from city to city, wayfinding through the twentieth century sky. And above all, consider the burial mounds, a sacred site for thousands of years, and still.