Winona, Minnesota

Winona is a city located in Winona County, Minnesota. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 27,069. Winona is the birthplace of actress Winona Ryder (Winona Horowitz) and the aviator Max Conrad. It is the county seat of Winona County6. Located in picturesque bluff country on the Mississippi River, its most noticable physical landmark is Sugar Loaf hill. Its annual celebration, "Steamboat Days," is held in the summer. It is home to the headquarters of the Watkins Corporation and Fastenal. Three college campuses are found in Winona: Winona State University, Saint Mary's University, and Minnesota State Colleges - Southeast Technical. Historically a community that was once served by a half-dozen passenger railroads, its current service is the once-daily Empire Builder, an Amtrak service between Chicago and Seattle/Portland. It is also the home of the Great River Shakespeare Festival (founded 2004), and there are plans to build the state-of-the-art Maritime Art Museum of Minnesota, a large river-themed history and art museum with one of its exhibits being the river dredge William H. Thompson, in the city's commercial harbor by 2006.

Geological history

For 300 million years rains washed sediment from land masses yet devoid of life. These sediments accumulated on the sea bottom. Sand, to be compressed into sandstone; silt and clay, later to form the pockets and layers of shale interleaved in the sandstone; all topped by limey sediments created as countless generations of primitive plants and animals died and sank to the sea floor, deposits which would be transformed to the Oneota dolomite, quarried in Winona from the mid 1880s till today.

Related Topics:
Sediment - Sandstone - Shale - Dolomite - 1880

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Thirty thousand years ago the last of the ice ages formed Glaciers that reached as far south as the area of Des Moines, Iowa.

Related Topics:
Ice age - Glacier - Des Moines, Iowa

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About twenty thousand years ago, the modern Mississippi River began to take shape. As the climate warmed, the Glacier ice sheets began a slow retreat, leaving a landscape ground flat behind them. The Mississippi blufflands and the hills and valleys of eastern Winona county were bypassed by the glacier, leaving a rugged landscape. The great ice sheet slowly moved northward into Canada. As ice melted the water formed a freshwater sea, Lake Agassiz over western Minnesota and North Dakota.

Related Topics:
Mississippi River - Canada - Freshwater - Lake Agassiz - Minnesota - North Dakota

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For 3,000 years a glacial river drained Lake Agassiz. The glacial melt water was clear, cold and relatively free of sediment, allowing it to carve a three hundred feet deep Mississippi valley river channel.

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Since then sediment carried by tributary streams have reshaped the Mississippi, changing it from a single, broad channel to a braided river, characterized by many smaller intertwining channels.

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The city of Winona lies atop a sand bar formed between two channels, the main channel of the Mississippi and Lake Winona, a secondary channel. This portion of the Mississippi runs from west to east. In ancient times the secondary channel was the main channel, but sediment from the Gilmore creek in the west and the Burns creek in the east cutoff the main river flow.

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