What’s the story behind the abandoned Cold War station in Finland, Minn.?

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On an abandoned Air Force station a few miles from Finland, Minn., tansy grows wild in the cracks of an old road and sprouts chest-high in front of open garage doors.

The dozens of empty, decrepit houses here have broken windows, walls covered in graffiti and midcentury stoves tugged from walls.

It looks like a ghost town. But during the Cold War, this was a key spot in the United States’ defense against the Soviet Union.

Noah Carlson of Milaca, Minn., has been curious about the old station ever since he came across a sign for Air Base Road while hiking the Superior Hiking Trail in the area.

Carlson later looked up the road and learned that it leads to the 100-plus acre station site on Lookout Mountain. In recent years, urban explorers have shared videos and photos of the old site online, showing rows of midcentury houses seemingly abandoned mid-thought.

“It’s kind of like something out of ‘Stranger Things,’” he said, referencing the popular Netflix series set in the 1980s.

In the early days of the Cold War, with heightened tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the threat of nuclear war was a push of the button away.

The U.S. government believed that enemy planes, if they came, would likely cross over the Arctic and Canada before breaching the northern border of the United States.

The remote spot near tiny Finland, an hour from Duluth, sat between the USSR and key targets of industrial America.

“The attack lines were all literally coming over the top” of the globe, said Jay Hagen, program director at Veterans Memorial Hall in Duluth.

The Finland Air Force Station, manned by the 756th Air Control and Warning Squadron, quietly opened in 1951. Nicknamed “Galahad,” sharing a name with a knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, it was one of a series of North American radar stations with about a 200-mile radius of watch area.

“There is nothing much due north of it except a lot of Canadian wilderness — and Russia," Minneapolis Tribune reporter Don Morrison wrote in the 1950s.

The slogan here, he wrote, was “Detect, Identify, Intercept, Destroy.”

In October 1951, Duluth News Tribune journalist Walter Eldot visited the base and found a site where morale was good and men worked with “clock-like precision,” he wrote. In the barracks, personal touches had been added to living spaces. There was automatic laundry, gleaming asphalt tile floors and a mess hall that was more like a dining room, according to Eldot.

There was one thing that the men didn’t love, though: the location. The station was out in “the wild blue yonder” with nothing around, Eldot wrote. Options for recreation were limited, and it took time and money to get to the region’s closest cities. The station did eventually get a curling rink.

When the Tribune’s Morrison visited seven years later, he found similar complaints.

The Finland Air Force Station was part of a network of northeastern Minnesota sites that were designed to protect the United States.

Near what is now the Duluth International Airport, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) building was constructed. This square, concrete structure housed massive computers that would receive radar information from Finland Air Station and, in turn, send it out.

When radar at the Finland station detected a plane in nearby airspace, it would note its altitude, speed and course. That plane’s route would be weighed against both private and military flight plans. If the plane wasn’t following a recorded flight plan, it would be considered a possible “bogey,” or enemy.

A fighter plane from Duluth’s Air National Guard Base, equipped with a rocket with a nuclear warhead called a “genie,” could be ready for takeoff within minutes. The pilot would identify the bogey as friend — perhaps a puddle jumper without a flight plan, Morrison wrote — or a Russian bomber.

The Air Force also operated the BOMARC missile site, located in a secluded spot outside of Duluth on the French River, in 1961. It had 28 silos lined in rows, each holding one of the 16,000-pound missiles.

None of this was common knowledge to civilians.

“I don’t think people realize how central Minnesota’s role was to the Cold War in the 1960s,” said Mike Scholtz, the documentary’s filmmaker.

All of this was just a blip in this region’s history. Within years, the technology at each site would become obsolete.

In 1972, the Duluth News Tribune reported that the French River site was closing and later ran a photograph of a flatbed truck with the word “explosives” in lieu of a license plate that was set to carry missiles out of state.

The weapons went to a storage depot in Virginia, where the Air Force said they might be used for target practice, the paper reported.

The Finland Air Force Station’s final month came in May 1980. Offices were emptied and packing boxes filled. The radar search tower was turned off, then the people left in shifts. The base’s commander planned to be the last one out. “I’ll turn out the lights,” Maj. Richard Hughes told the Duluth News Tribune.

By late June 1982, a classified ad in the Duluth News Tribune listed the station (including its radar equipment) for sale. It was “ideal for institutional uses or research,” the ad claimed.

By 1995, the old station site had become Lookout Mountain Village, a housing complex. But that year, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency asked residents to stop using the water. It “smelled like fuel oil,” the Duluth News Tribune reported at the time.

Today, the place is listed as a Superfund site. According to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, the Army Corps of Engineers conducts long-term monitoring there.

The site is for sale, and has been for years. It’s billed as having a view of Lake Superior. More than half of the 43 houses on-site could be refurbished, according to the listing, which also describes it as having “beautiful park settings, a baseball field, private septic treatment plant, and newer 1,200-foot well.” It’s one of the highest spots in Minnesota.

“I describe it as 100 acres of unlimited potential,” Crandall said.

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