Early Artist Conception of the Minnesota Experimental City

On February 12, 1973, an obscure state agency called the Minnesota Experimental City (MXC) Authority announced that it wanted to build a new city—with a population of a quarter of a million people—in northern Minnesota’s Aitkin County, about 30 miles south of Grand Rapids. Plans for MXC had been in the works since the mid 1960s. Some of the early proposals imagined that it would fit under a dome (which could then be gazed upon by appreciative downhill skiers, apparently) and produce almost zero pollution. The idea did not go over well. Many, if not most, Aitkin County residents thought the MXC Authority was being presumptuous. No one, after all, had asked them whether they wanted 250,000 new neighbors. (They didn’t.) Local opposition to MXC was intense and quick to develop. Within a couple months of the announcement, the project was all but dead.

Anti-MXC Banner, Sent to Governor Wendell Anderson by an Aitkin County Cub Scout

Images via Minnesota Historical Society