Please use waypoint parking. No need to go near railroad tracks.
How Cuyuna Country Got Its Name (as printed in Volume 1 of Cuyuna Country: A Peoples' History)
Cuy u na. Mysterious, ancient, Native American sounding, the word seems to echo an enticing invitation. "Come, be a part, be one with a land blessed in ages past by Kitchi Manitou, The Great Spirit, and with those who walked here before us."
There is something special about a land where nature, in less than a generation of man-years, has restored pristine beauty to a landscape that had been devastated; covering slashed hillsides with aspen, oak and pine, filling gouged-out mine pits with sparkling emerald waters teeming with life. That ability to come back - to restore one's self - has become the heritage bestowed upon us by nature and by generations past. It has become the benchmark of Cuyuna Country.
Cuy u na. The name sounds Native American, but it is not. Credit Cuyler Adams, surveyor, explorer, prospector, entrepreneur, who first proved out iron deposits, opened one of the first underground iron mines, and mapped out the Cuyuna Range in the last decade of the 19th Century.
Legend has it that at his wife's suggestion, Mr. Adams coined the name by taking the first syllable of his name, Cuy, and adding to it Una, the name of the St. Bernard that was his constant companion on his explorations. That's probably the true story.
Another story is that many settlers in the Deerwood area thought Adams would never amount to much. Whenever they saw Cuyler and his dog exploring, they would say to one another, "There go Cuy and Una!"
After the cessation of mining, the iron range was renamed Cuyuna Country to include a much larger area: from Bay Lake-Deerwood on the south to Emily-Outing-Fifty Lakes on the north; from Iron Hub on the east to Riverton on the west.