Teenage Eagle Scout designs, builds veterans memorial in Olivia, Minn.

OLIVIA — Dom Claseman and his dad are tight. His dad is Scoutmaster for the Boy Scout troop for Dom and his two younger brothers. They love to go camping together all over Minnesota, especially Ham Lake. Dom and his dad tease each other nonstop, but there's no mistaking the love between the two.

When Dom, now a high school senior in this farm town of 2,500 people 90 miles west of the Twin Cities, was brainstorming for his Eagle Scout project, he thought of his dad, Mark Jurgensen. Jurgensen, who served in Iraq with the Minnesota National Guard, raised his boys with a deep respect for military veterans. Dom thought of the Freedom Rocks, pieces of art that honor veterans and are painted on boulders in each of Iowa's 99 counties. And he thought of the Shrine of the Grotto of the Redemption, also in Iowa, an enormous, ambitious Catholic shrine Dom has visited with his family.

His small town needed something ambitious, he thought. It needed a veterans memorial.

"Lots of people thought it wasn't going to happen," Dom said on a recent summer afternoon, "until I started building it. Then people jumped on."

He was standing at Kubesh Park a block off Olivia's main drag, site of his newly completed veterans memorial. Olivia calls itself "The Corn Capital of the World," county seat of Minnesota's top corn-producing county. Before Memorial Day, when Dom unveiled his project to a crowd of 300 people, the piece of art the town was best known for was a 50-foot monument of an ear of corn.

An Eagle Scout project is the culmination of a decade in the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. Scouts come up with all sorts of ideas, from landscaping in city parks to cleaning up habitats for the Department of Natural Resources, from building and stocking Little Free Libraries to building a 250-foot accessible boardwalk at a nature preserve.

While dollar value isn't the measure of a project — the goal is displaying community leadership — Dom's project still stands out.

"I've been here 25-plus years, and I've never seen an Eagle Scout project like this one," said Dave Arola, training and advancement director for Northern Star Scouting, which covers 25 counties in Minnesota and western Wisconsin and certifies 500 Eagle Scout projects a year. "This is absolutely an amazing project, the foresight for a kid that age to understand how important this is for a community. The scale and scope of what had to happen, and the vision this scout had, is just incredible."

Dom is a throwback. Ask what he loves most and he says working. He has pulled weeds in fields of beans and corn and sugar beets every summer since age 12. He also works at an assisted-living home for people with traumatic brain injuries. He loves cars and can tell you what model a car is just from hearing its exhaust. He is proud that he bought his 2015 Dodge Dart Rallye with money he's earned, and he's saving up for a Dodge Charger. He loves the outdoors and Minecraft.

He doesn't think he'll follow in his dad's footsteps by going into the military or by working as a paramedic for the local ambulance service ("the boom boom wagon" is how Dom teases his dad). Maybe he'll be a nurse, or a farmer, or an architect, or a contractor.

"He likes to be busy," said his mom, Wendy Jurgensen. "He's happiest when he's not sitting still."

Once Dom got this idea in his head, he couldn't stop talking about it. He sketched ideas on slips of paper. He talked about his project on local radio, solicited donations at local businesses and handed out pamphlets at community events. A $250 donation got a veteran's name on a paver; the hardest part was double-checking spellings of 280 veterans' names.

It took Dom about four weeks to build, mostly on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. A local veteran volunteered to do the concrete work if Dom purchased the supplies. Dom installed pavers and plants, flag poles and statues, including tributes to a veteran missing in Vietnam and those killed in Iraq.

The idea he was most nervous about was the 21 bootsteps imprinted in the concrete, symbolizing the 21-gun salute, the highest military honor, as well as the 21-step marches the honor guard takes during shifts at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Dom asked his dad to do that part. So Jurgensen fetched his old boots from Iraq from the basement , and he used them to walk those steps.

The family is not done. Dom's younger brothers — Jayden, 15, and Ahren, 13 — are Star Scouts. Their next ranks are Life Scout, then Eagle Scout. For their Eagle Scout project, the boys plan to expand the veterans memorial that their older brother started.