Construction on the new Minnesota Military & Veterans Museum in Little Falls has reached a key milestone. The 40,000-square-foot facility, being built next to Camp Ripley, is about halfway complete, according to Randal Dietrich, the museum's executive director.

“Right now, sitting at the beginning of June, I see us at kind of the midpoint of all that construction happening out there along Highway 371, the idea being that Breitbach Construction will finish up their work probably at the end of January 2026,” Dietrich said.

Once construction wraps, the museum team will need another six months or more to transfer tens of thousands of military artifacts and finalize the galleries. Dietrich projects the museum will open to the public in mid-to-late summer of 2026.

“So July, August, September would be a time for the community to come together and see the new space and celebrate veterans alongside of us,” he said.

The site will also include Camp Ripley offices and classrooms. A new gallery being developed by Josh Pennington and his team will explore Camp Ripley’s past and present, including its conservation initiatives. Pennington oversees the environmental stewardship work at Camp Ripley and operates the Skoglund Environmental Classroom, a destination popular with school children.

Dietrich emphasized the emotional and professional significance of the project for his team.

“How does it feel? Exhilarating. Sure, there’s a lot of work to be done. Thankfully, increasingly, our team dedicated to this cause keeps getting bigger. Folks are stepping forward to lend a hand. It’s a labor of love for a lot of them. It’s for me, it is for the people, I think, I work with,” he said. “To be doing this, it’s something that is kind of a once in a lifetime opportunity to build a building from the ground up, dedicated solely to the veteran experience.”

He added, “We’ve occupied these spaces at Camp Ripley to the best of our ability for years, to design a building from the ground up, really, with all those considerations in mind, is a tremendous opportunity and obligation to do it right and I think we’re doing a good job. I’m happy where we’re at. There’s a lot of work still to come, but I think we have the team in place to do it.”

The building’s roof has recently been completed, marking a visible step in progress. One of the most exciting features still to come is the installation of the decommissioned sail and rudder from the USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul, a nuclear-powered Los Angeles-class submarine.

Dietrich explained that a 360-foot mound shaped like a submarine hull has been created outside the museum to give the illusion that the submarine is submerged, with the sail and rudder protruding.

According to Allies, a museum publication, “The USS Minneapolis-Saint Paul was a nuclear-powered Los Angeles Class submarine in service between 1984 and 2008. It was the first vessel of the United States Navy to be named for the Twin Cities metropolitan area. Known with the hull classification of SSN-708, the submarine served with distinction in Operation Desert Shield and the First Gulf War.”

The sail and rudder were transported from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard to the museum in 2022 by Anderson Trucking Service. Restoration work, currently underway at C4 Welding in Sauk Rapids, is nearly finished, and Dietrich hopes the installation will take place by crane within a month.

Beyond restoring the structure, the museum is working to preserve the human stories behind the submarine.

“The people that have worked on that behind the scenes are some of those people who just care an awful lot about preserving, in this case, naval history and having that be so prominent on the site is something I’m excited about,” Dietrich said.

Originally reported by Sheila McCoy Morrison County Record in Hometown Source.