Daniel Laurito Del Conte, a photographer from Cottage Grove, is photographing all 87 Minnesota counties for "America's Silent Valor," a black-and-white book on how the state remembers those who served. Each chapter has four pages: the county's facts and its story of service, the place where it remembers, a place named for one of its own, and a landscape of the county.
The Hennepin County chapter includes Victory Memorial Drive, where in 1921 Minneapolis planted an elm for each of the 568 Hennepin County residents who died in the First World War. Two of them were airmen, 1st Lt. Ernest G. Wold, 21, and Sgt. Cyrus F. Chamberlain, 29, both killed in France in the summer of 1918, whose names the city gave to its airfield in 1923: Wold-Chamberlain Field, today Minneapolis–Saint Paul International. Their bronze markers lie flat at the foot of the trees on the drive. The chapter closes on the Stone Arch Bridge at St. Anthony Falls.
The book will be published on Amazon on July 4, 2027. Through its Volume Partners, the project is working to place a copy in every American Legion and VFW post in Minnesota. Local companies can sponsor their county's chapter; details are at americasv.org/sponsors.
Comments
No comments on this item Please log in to comment by clicking here