The Estherville Meteorite

Late on a Saturday afternoon, the tenth of May, eighteen seventy-nine, the sky over Estherville exploded. People felt the ground tremble, dishes rattled in cupboards, and window panes cracked as a fireball tore across the heavens from southwest to northeast, breaking apart, trailing ribbons of smoke. What came down was a meteorite, a rare stony-iron type, and it remains one of the most famous falls in the Midwest.

Searchers dug a mass weighing more than four hundred pounds out of the ground, where it had buried itself some fifteen feet deep, then recovered a second large piece and many smaller fragments scattered across farmland. Pieces of it now sit in the Smithsonian, in Vienna, and in Munich. A sculpture in Estherville honors that day, showing the meteor caught in the moment it broke apart.