TOWER, Minnesota – Last week, three Norwegian carpenters taught three Minnesota carpenters how to assemble cabin-like homes that were shipped in pieces from central Norway to this small town near where the Iron Range meets the Boundary Waters.
Late in the afternoon of the first day, one of the Norwegian carpenters came to Orlyn Kringstad to arrange the project.
“He said, ‘Everything is perfect,'” Kringstad told me two days later, as the roofs of the two houses were being put up. “I had the biggest grin on my face.”
The next morning, two of the Norwegian carpenters and the CEOs of two Norwegian companies sat with a tile dealer from Duluth and explained that bathrooms in Norway were slightly lower than the rest of the house and sloped down to a drain – but in the cottages in America, only the shower sloped down. This was an intellectual property transfer on an international level, with metric measurements being converted in real time on iPhones.
“My ultimate goal is to build a more stable economy in Tower based on the town’s main source of income, which is tourism,” Kringstad said. “Forestry and mining are still here. But the question is, ‘What do we need to do to get companies to locate here?'”
The starting point is residential homes. The homes are the first of six to be built before winter along the canal that connects Tower’s small harbor to Lake Vermilion. If all goes according to plan, another 42 will be built next year on land owned by Your Boat Club, a Minneapolis-based company that operates several dozen marinas in four states. The goal is to attract more people to the state’s fifth-largest lake and get them to use its marina and services.
The 48 houses would be the largest construction project in the history of Tower, which was founded in 1889 and now has about 200 residential units. Prices range from $200,000 for duplexes to $400,000 to $600,000 for detached houses.
“It’s so hard to get capital in a small community like this because people just assume – and maybe rightly – that the return here is never going to be as high as it would be in a larger community,” said Marshall Helmberger, co-founder of the Timberjay newspaper and executive director of the Tower Economic Development Authority. “You really have to find people with a slightly different vision who are maybe not as focused on the bottom line, and that’s someone like Orlyn.”
