They appeal to everyone — city folk, country folk, anyone who's ever played with a  barn kitten. They're graceful structures, built in every size and shape. And they evoke a nostalgia for simpler times, when ordinary people who worked hard could prosper.

Their blocky Bunyan landed on the pages of Life magazine and the New York Times, and the 1938 Winter Carnival drew 100,000 people to the town of 7,200. It was a bonanza for Bemidji, mired in the Depression and down to its last sawmill.

The mighty lumberjack most likely was born in the camps of Maine or Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, northern Minnesota towns have taken the legend and run with it.

Akeley calls itself Paul Bunyan’s birthplace, and it’s got a good claim — it was the headquarters of the Red River Lumber Co., where, in 1914, a publicist named William Laughead is said to have written the first Paul Bunyan story in a company brochure. Today, Minnesota's largest Bunyan, a fiberglass 33-footer, kneels with outstretched hand outside the town's Paul Bunyan History Museum, where a 28-pound fish is labeled "Paul's Minnow."

Why worry about the lost billions on Wall Street when there's treasure everywhere, under fallen logs, in the crooks of trees, on the girders of bridges? Why think about the future when you can be out in the woods channeling Long John Silver, Indiana Jones and the Hardy Boys?

In the middle of the last century, a motley collection of ordinary folk — a dairy farmer, a car dealer, a tavern owner, a factory worker — took a sharp turn away from the ordinary. Out of the blue, they began to fashion fairy-tale characters, castles, temples and historical figures out of concrete, adorning them with bits of glass, crockery, porcelain and seashells and toiling until their yards overflowed with figures.