Red Wing is another cute town that has invested in its ambiance. Red Wing Shoes was started here and now its corporate headquarters takes up a whole city block. This is the historic train station that now includes a gift shop, tourist office, and the chamber of commerce.

We loved the prairie-style windows and the memorabilia inside the train station.

On the other side of the tracks is a lovely riverside park.

The flower baskets around town are a project started by the Kiwanis Club. They started with 12 baskets and now there are more than 200. Funding comes from the town and many, many donations from Red Wing's citizens.

Looking from the park up the street. The historic St. James Hotel is on the right and Red Wing's corporate headquarters is behind the trees on the left.

This is the corporate headquarters of Red Wing Shoe Company. They have invested heavily in the town. The company now owns the St. James Hotel across the street. Note the silos at the end of the street.

The corporate headquarters looks like a series of retail storefronts, but across the street there is an actual Red Wing retail store. 

 
The door is part of the headquarters building and the boot out front is from a town fund-raiser.

Details on the St. James.

The public art and the fountain—very tasteful.

    
We stopped at a park on the shore of Lake Pepin (also the Mississippi River, but up here it is a series of dammed lakes) and learned that there used to be 50 button factories along the Mississippi where the majority of the shell buttons came from for the garment industry in this country. Now no one uses shell buttons anymore and some of the mussels that they had used are endangered. We were not tempted to enter the river.

A little farther down the river, we stopped along the road to take a picture of this tug pushing some barges. 

There was a dam looming ahead, so we decided that it would be fun to watch it go through the lock.

We had camped in Afton (at the yellow A) and we stopped at Lake Pepin (at the yellow B).

Here we are at Dam#5 and that night we camped at Wildcat Landing (at the yellow C). But back to the dams...

Here are the dams down to St. Louis. The scale is feet to miles so it looks much steeper to fit the whole section of the river into the graphic. Of course the real dam #1 was that beaver dam, but that isn't shown here.

The pilot of the tug had no trouble pushing his load to the lock. At this point we see that it's 9 barges. 

 
The guy walking beside the barges has no trouble keeping up the pace. The barges are empty with their covers stacked up.

Meanwhile, a train is also hauling a load of freight along the river.

The nine barges just barely fit into the lock, so the pusher tug waits until the barges are on the other side of the lower gate. There are no pumps used—just the flow of the river and the use of valves.  

Finally the pusher comes through. It's a long process and when you think of all those dams on the river it's not an easy trip up or down the river.

I looked on Google Earth when we got home and the satellite caught another 9-barge load going into the lock at Dam #5.