Barn Bluff

Barn Bluff, also known as LaGrange or Twin Mountain, is one of the best known natural features along the Mississippi, rising some 343 feet above the modern city of Red Wing. Composed of various Paleozoic rocks, including sandstone, siltstone, and dolomite, and capped by some 35 feet of sand, gravel, and loess deposited by glaciation, it drew praise for its sweeping view from Jonathan Carver in the 18th century, from topographical engineer Stephen H. Long during his 1819 mapping expedition, and from artist Henry Lewis, who called the view incredibly beautiful while remarking on a mass of rattlesnakes there. Many of Minnesota's early tourists, including Henry David Thoreau, climbed it. Lewis also related an Indian Legend in which a mountain once twice as large stood here until the Great Spirit, settling a quarrel between the inhabitants of two Dakota villages without bloodshed, divided it into two parts, leaving one here and moving the other downstream to the place Lewis identified as Sugar Loaf above today's city of Winona.

Red Wing, Minnesota · United States