The interesting part about Minneapolis is that it has two grids. Early development occurred at angles to the Mississippi river, while later development straightened out to N-S and E-W orientation.
Some of my family were stock farmers in Australia and talked about 10, 5, 3 and 2 chain roads a bit too when talking about driving routes between places in rural and forested regions. You’d know the (maybe abandoned or ruined versus still existing small settlement) destination - by the description of the width of the roads getting there.
I’m not sure how much of this was connected to what seemed to be a multi-generational familial problem recalling proper nouns.
As someone who didn’t grow up there it was a bit different to what I was used to - named roads or road numbers, named settlements or geographic identifiers.
The chain makes more sense as being one tenth of a furlong (as still used in horse racing in the US, Great Britain and Ireland!), which is of course one eighth of a mile.
Also, an acre is one furlong long by one chain wide.
Not coincidentally, a cricket pitch is one chain long.
My education was almost all in the metric system but a decent knowledge of the imperial system still makes the world a bit easier to understand.
Friends father did the forestry course in edinburgh during ww2: it was held to be sufficiently important it was a reserved occupation (not subject to the draft)
On graduation and inevitable employment by the forestry commission you got your chain: a vital tool of the job, as well as useful for marking out cricket pitches. (They are one chain long)
This happens on train routes through towns (or, towns that developed where trains stopped) and the track is at an angle to North. Frequently the first few blocks nearest the track are aligned to the track, and then the town says “wait a minute” and suddenly everything orients to the cardinal directions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoddle_Grid