On a November day in 1898, Swedish immigrant farmer Olof Ohman was clearing trees on his property near the village of Kensington, about fifteen miles southwest of Alexandria. According to his account, he found a flat stone slab entwined in the roots of an aspen tree, its face covered in unfamiliar markings. The inscriptions turned out to be runes -- the alphabetic characters used by medieval Scandinavians. Translated, the text described a party of thirty men, Goths and Norwegians, on an exploration journey from Vinland westward in the year 1362. Ten members of the party, the inscription claimed, were found dead upon the explorers' return to their camp. If genuine, the stone would rewrite the history of European contact with North America, placing Scandinavian explorers deep in the continent's interior more than a century before Columbus.

The first scientific examination in 1910 set the tone for what would become a drawn-out academic battle. Scandinavian linguists and historians examined the inscription and unanimously pronounced it a fraud of recent date, noting anachronistic rune forms and language that did not match fourteenth-century usage. Some critics directly charged Ohman with fabrication, pointing out that the National Romanticism movement sweeping Scandinavia at the time had stirred intense popular interest in Viking exploration -- and that Ohman, a Swedish immigrant, would have been immersed in that cultural moment. Yet the stone has its defenders. A succession of amateur historians, geologists, and even some academics have argued for authenticity, pointing to weathering patterns, mineral deposits in the carved grooves, and the presence of rare runic characters. The debate has generated hundreds of books, articles, and television specials over the decades.

The Runestone Museum, established in 1958, wisely frames its centerpiece artifact within a much broader story. Beyond the famous stone, the museum's galleries explore the deep history of the people who actually did live in this landscape for millennia -- the Dakota and Ojibwe peoples whose presence predates any European contact by thousands of years. Exhibits on Minnesota's homesteading era document the waves of German, Norwegian, and Swedish immigrants who transformed the prairies in the nineteenth century. Fort Alexandria, a replica frontier settlement on the museum grounds, features authentic log buildings from the 1860s through 1910s. And then there is Snorri, a 40-foot Viking ship replica that sits on the grounds, named for Snorri Thorfinnson, traditionally considered the first European child born in North America. A Children's Discovery Room rounds out the collection with hands-on exhibits. The museum treats the Runestone as a starting point for conversation rather than a settled conclusion.

Alexandria sits in the heart of Minnesota's lake district, surrounded by more than a thousand lakes carved by glaciers during the last ice age. Douglas County alone contains over 200 of them, and the town has long marketed itself as a vacation destination for fishing, boating, and cabin life. The Viking identity grafted onto this landscape through the Runestone controversy has proved remarkably durable. Big Ole, the fiberglass Viking statue sculpted by Gordon Schumaker, was built in 1965 for the New York World's Fair and returned to Alexandria that December, where he has stood ever since -- four tons of steel and fiberglass towering over the downtown. The high school teams are the Cardinals, but the town's cultural allegiance belongs to Norse mythology. Whether the Kensington Runestone is a genuine medieval artifact or an elaborate nineteenth-century creation, it has given Alexandria something most small towns never achieve: a story that the world keeps coming back to hear.