Some of Jim Jansen’s earliest memories involve playing on a 51-foot beacon tower and giant concrete arrow outside his family’s farmhouse in Cottage Grove.

“I used to climb up to the top of the tower,” said Jansen, 81, a farmer who still lives in the house on 90th Street where he was born.

“When I was a young kid, everything looked big. I was this tall,” he said, putting his hand to his hip, “and we’ve got this big giant thing in the back yard. I couldn’t get into the top part. It was locked shut, but I kept trying.”

Jansen’s makeshift playground served an important purpose: It was part of an elaborate navigation system built coast-to-coast early in the 20th century to help pilots deliver mail for the U.S. Post Office.

In the days before radar and GPS, pilots flying the air-mail route to the Twin Cities knew to look for the shining rotating beacon and the 70-foot-long bright-yellow directional arrow in Cottage Grove.

“It points northwest,” Jansen said. “That way they knew which way to go to get to Holman Field (in St. Paul). They used to keep it brightly painted, so it was easy to see. There were some big numbers painted on it, like, 3-7-9. The numbers were probably about 3-feet high; they meant something to the pilots, apparently.”

Jansen believes the arrow was installed in 1930, two years after his father, Ben, bought the 240-acre farm.

“They wanted to put it out in the field across the road (90th Street), and my dad says: ‘Why would you want to put it out in the field? You put it right behind the house,’ ” Jansen said. “It turned out to be a good thing because if it was out in the middle of a field, it would have been in our way, and we would have done away with it years ago. But behind the house, it never bothered us, so it’s just there.”

The beacon — about 2 to 3 feet in diameter — rotated every 7 seconds, but because the tower was so high, the light shone above the house.

“It didn’t bother us at night, but it bothered some of our neighbors a mile or two away because it would shine in their windows,” he said. “My uncle used to call this place the Beacon Light Farm.” Related Articles 3M pollution solution: $700 million on water system upgrades

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Jansen believes his parents received a nominal amount — maybe $10 — for housing the navigation system. “Of course, $10 in those days was a lot of money,” he said.

On a clear night, the Jansens could see other beacons flashing near Prescott, Wis., and Red Wing, Minn.

The beacon and tower were removed in 1954, a year after Jansen graduated from St. Paul Park High School.

“Whatever government agency it was, they came and removed it,” he said. “They didn’t need it anymore.”

NOW A TOURIST ATTRACTION

The arrow remained, however, and Jansen turned part of it into a basketball court in the 1970s for his three children; the metal hoop and pole are still there.

It has become somewhat of a tourist attraction in the past few years thanks to media reports. A Science Channel “What on Earth?” episode about the system aired last year, and several articles have been published.

“Everybody is curious, once they know about it,” Jansen said. “It’s a small world now. Ten years ago, no one knew about this. The communication we have now is incredible. I had a guy drive up on his motorcycle from Winona just to look at it a few years ago. Last summer, there was someone from Wisconsin.”

Still, he said, most locals who drive by don’t notice it.

Local historian Herb Reckinger recently learned about the arrow and visited the site for the first time last month.

“I am proof that you can drive by something for 35 to 40 years and not pay any attention to it,” said Reckinger, a director of the South Washington County Heritage Society. “But when you find out what it is — and the significance that it had to early mail routes through here by plane — it’s just a great thing.”

More than 14,500 miles of lighted airways were created as part of the navigation system that operated primarily from 1926 to 1935, before radio beacons began to take its place, said aviation historian Ray Hawkins of Aurora, Colo.

The system included about 2,000 giant arrows, 10 miles apart. About 100 of them can still be seen using Google Earth, he said.

Jansen’s arrow was known as No. 37 on the Milwaukee to St. Paul-Minneapolis route, indicating the site was 370 miles from the beginning of the route, Hawkins said. It’s believed to be the only arrow remaining in Minnesota.

115 ARROWS ACROSS AMERICA

Brian and Charlotte Smith, a retired couple from Loomis, Calif., have spent much of the past four years documenting the surviving arrows and beacons. Their website, Arrows Across America, shows 115 arrows and 321 beacons remaining in the U.S.

“We’ve been traveling across the U.S. taking drone photos of the arrows,” Charlotte Smith said in a phone interview Monday. “Right now we are in Marshall, Ill., heading for the arrows near Indianapolis. Then we’re headed to Iowa City to take a picture there. We’re trying to get to as many of them as we can. We have visited 62 of them, and hope to add a few more before we finish this (four-week) trip.”

Charlotte Smith became interested in the topic in 2013 after reading an email that had been forwarded to her husband from a friend.

“It intrigued me, and I wanted to know where they were because I had never heard of them,” she said. “I’d never seen them, and I wanted to see if I could find one. I searched Google every day for about a week. Before I knew it, I had found 52 of them.”

She has created a spreadsheet that contains more than 15,000 entries on the navigation system, which was established by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Smith’s favorite arrow is the Golconda site in Humboldt County, Nevada. “I like the mountains all around it,” she said. “It’s up on a little hill, and it looks out over the freeway. You can see all the traffic going by. You can see the snow-covered mountains around it in the spring. It’s just a gorgeous environment.”

Brian Smith, a retired officer with the California Highway Patrol, hikes out to the sites and takes photos. His favorite arrow is the Silver Zone Arrow, off Interstate 80 in Nevada, about 20 miles west of the Nevada-Utah border. “It’s a 90-degree right-angle arrow,” he said. “It points to the Great Salt Lake.”

He uses a drone — the couple’s grandson, Harrison Houser, then 9, taught him how to use it two years ago — to photograph the arrows from the air. Related Articles Q&A: What does banning TikTok and WeChat mean for users?

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“It gives people a better perspective of what these things look like,” he said. “They’re usually out in the middle of nowhere.”

Some beacons remain in use in remote areas of Montana, but most were removed during World War II because authorities “did not want the enemy to find their way inland, especially on the West and East coasts,” Charlotte Smith said.

“A lot of the arrows got covered over with dirt at that time, and a lot of them got broken up,” she said. “One in Idaho had rocks piled high on top of it.”

Renewed interest in the arrows has led people to go out and clean them up and paint them again, she said.

“That’s the most gratifying thing about finding them all,” she said. “People care about them. They’re not being destroyed anymore.”