Minnesota Counties, Ranked: Number 86, Norman County

There are 87 counties in Minnesota. I’ve lived here my entire life, so I am the only one both qualified and fearless enough to rank them from 1-87. While these rankings are just my opinion, they are correct and not subject to debate. If you disagree, you are wrong and a bad person.

OVERVIEW: This is the first time anyone has heard of Norman County. You may think I'm making it up, and you'd be right to do so! But it's real. It's on all the major map apps.

NAMED AFTER: Competing narratives! Some say it's named after all the settlers from Norway; others say Norman Kittson, who already has a county named after him. Quit hogging the remote northwestern Minnesota spotlight, Norm. Leave some shine for another fur trader or mercantilist.

Suffice it to say, this is the most interesting thing about Norman County.

LARGEST CITY: Ada. Population: 1,740. I bet the resentful citizens of Borup (population: 96) hate those city slickers in Ada with their stop signs and tap water.

DOES IT HAVE A PIZZA RANCH: A better question is probably if it has pizza.

PERSONAL EXPERIENCE: Driven through. With haste.

REDEEMING QUALITIES: As we saw with Wilkin County last week, a giant statue of an unlikely thing seems to be what's on offer out in our great state's Forbidden Zone. In Norman's case, the world's largest sugar beet sculpture resides in Halstad. It's a 21-foot-tall former cement drum, created by artist John Porter in 2019.

CELEBS: You're kidding, right?

LETTER GRADE: F

READER FEEDBACK

Instituting this because my friend Matt came to Wilkin County's mild defense after last week's newsletter.

So, I grew up across the river in Wahpeton. What I will say for Wilkin County is, from '77 or so to the early 90s, just outside Breckenridge, there was a place called Vagt's Barn. Dude turned the loft of his barn into a dance hall. Every weekend, the farm became a cop-free, underage-drinking utopia.

Summer '87, a friend and I sat in my grandmother's GMC S-15, collecting all the change we could find in the cab (I had been driving the truck all summer and would just throw my drive-through change on the floor). We scraped together enough quarters so we could both get in to see...The Suburbs!

For some reason, when I was a kid, Wahpeton's sister city, the much smaller Breckenridge, was the livelier of the two towns: Breck had a Shakey's Pizza, a Hardee's, and another pizza joint with (until the State School in Wahp put in a bunch of games) the best video game arcade outside of Fargo.

Somehow, I never got busted coming out of Vagt's. Where that *did* happen was at Stub's, a restaurant further down 210, in Battle Lake. Their dance floor, inexplicably, the underage nights were DJ'd with the best New Wave/Alt bangers of The Mid/Late Eighties. Young Jake Rudh caught the DJ bug there!

As someone who grew up drinking Old Milwaukee returnables in gravel pits and at four-way rural crossroads, a barn with music and beer sounds like actual teenage dirtbag heaven.

Also, this from subscriber Karate Gum:

I grew up in ND. Summer of '98 I participated in ND Boys' State mock government whatever at the State School of Science in Wahpeton. For some reason one afternoon, they marched all several hundred of us to a nearby park to watch a little Wahp vs. Breck hot American Legion baseball action. Being teenage dipshits, we heckled the hell out of the Breckenridge players, especially the shortstop who committed two or three errors.

Fast-forward a year-and-a-half to my freshman year at SJU and there's a dude from Breck in my dorm. At some point I told this story and — I shit you not — he was the shortstop. Until that conversation, he had no idea why there were so many people at that one game or why they were so rabidly anti-Breckenridge.

If you have a similar defense of Ada's unsung features, or tormented Norman County West's shortstop before rooming with him at a MIAC college, you know how to reach me.

See you tomorrow.