Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County

Remembering Mel and Lucy Johnson

1/6/2023

Remembering Mel and Lucy Johnson, by Markus Krueger, Programming Director

I read in the paper that my friend Mel Johnson passed away on December 18 at age 102. Mel was one of the original volunteers of the Hjemkomst Center when the museum opened its doors in 1986. I spent many Monday mornings sitting next to him at the museum’s admissions desk. He rang people in and ushered them into the theater to watch the movie about the Viking Ship while I waited to give them a tour of the Hopperstad Stave Church. Not a lot of tourists come to Fargo during the winter months, so we had plenty of time to chat. He once told me that he took a tumble off his bicycle, so he was probably going to stop riding. I was shocked and impressed. “Mel! You’re in your mid-90s! You’re still riding a bicycle?!?”

Mel grew up in Fergus Falls, the son of Norwegian immigrants. In February of 1942, two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Mel entered the US Army at age 21. He served in Europe until his honorable discharge two months after the war ended in 1945. He deserved a good life when he got home, and he got it. He landed a sweet career as a travelling ice cream salesman.
Mel worked for Muggs Ice Cream Shop in Fergus Falls before the war and he returned after a couple years at the U of M. In the summer of 1948, Lucille Haugen, a young teacher, got a summer job at Muggs. She was smart, beautiful, good natured with a warm smile, and half a century later she would be one of the finest tour guides for Moorhead’s Hopperstad Stave Church. Mel and Lucy married two weeks after meeting each other. He would have been a fool to wait longer. They were blessed with three kids and 73 anniversaries together before her passing 11 months ago.

In 1956, Mel and Lucy moved to the booming town of Moorhead, Minnesota. To thank Mel and his fellow soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines for saving the world the previous decade, our government passed the GI Bill, which gave them certain benefits like free college tuition and cheap home loans. The Johnsons built a brand new rambler a few blocks outside of town (now roughly the city center), about the corner of 17th St. and 17th Ave S. It cost them $12,500 to build. Zillow says its worth close to $200,000 today. I visited their home once – original mid-century modern woodwork, an old photo of Lucy that made me wonder why Mel waited so long to marry her, and a freezer full of ice cream.
Lucy went back to teaching elementary school. Each volunteered at the Hjemkomst Center when they retired. It makes me sad to realize I’ll never see them again. But I imagine a summer evening long ago, Mel behind the wheel of a classic 1950s car on his way home to Lucy and the kids and a bowl of ice cream. It was sweet knowing you both.

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Book Review of the Month: April 2022

4/1/2022

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Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America

Book by Mayukh Sen, published November 16, 2021

Book Review by Emily Kulzer, Director of Museum Operations

One of the things I love most about living in the Fargo-Moorhead is the variety of cuisines that are available here. One can take a veritable epicurean tour across the globe without leaving the metro area. Restaurants that serve Chinese, Mexican, Indian, Thai, Mediterranean, African, Vietnamese, and Italian food are just a few examples of the different cultures represented in the FM area alone. I decided to pick up this book not only because I love the taste of food but because I also want to better appreciate the cultures and the people behind the food. This book does just that.

Taste Makers contains short biographies of seven immigrant women who influenced how Americans eat today. Chao Yang Buwei (China), Elena Zeleyeta (Mexico), Madeleine Kamman (France), Marcella Hazan (Italy), Julie Sahni (India), Najmieh Batmanglij (Iran), and Norma Shirley (Jamaica) are who Mayukh Sen dubs the “Taste Makers” who have revolutionized the way that Americans eat starting in the 1930s to the present day. These women were crucial to bringing the cuisine of their home countries to America. Julia Child is also discussed in the book but only as an interlude.

How to Cook and Eat in Chinese, 1949 Edition. Source: Amazon.com

Chao Yang Buwei, ca. 1910. Source: Public Domain

Chao Yang Buwei was a physician by trade. She says she became interested in cooking while attending medical school in Tokyo because she found Japanese food “inedible.”

I appreciate the way that Sen gives context to the lives of these women by connecting their stories world events and attitudes. This context creates a book that isn’t just about food history. It is also about immigration, gender, diversity, and socio-economic issues. Each of these women were faced with the challenges that came with being immigrants in America, as well as being women in a field which was, and still is, dominated by white men.

A criticism that I’ve seen from other readers of Taste Makers has been, that it’s too short and is lacking detail. Could Sen have spent more time on each woman’s story and gone into more detail? Sure. Do I think that it would have made this book better? Not necessarily. Sen’s brevity did leave me wanting more, but in a good way. It caused me to seek out the cookbooks and recipes written by these women and I’m looking forward to trying some of them at home.

Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, 1961 Edition. Source: thriftbooks.com

Elena Zelayeta on the set of her cooking show “It’s Fun to Eat”, 1950. Source: University of San Francisco.

Elena Zelayeta was a restauranteur, cookbook author, and culinary instructor. She was also blind. In the early 1950s, she became the first Latin American to host a televised cooking show. She reportedly had a rope tied to her pant legs that producers would tug to let her know which camera to turn to.

In my opinion, Taste Makers earns a 4.5 out of 5 stars. I enjoyed all the short biographies of all the women and the historical context that Sen provides. I do, however, wish that the interlude on Julia Child would have been shorter or excluded all together. American-born Julia Child is probably whom all of us think of when we think of the most influential female chefs in the last century. I’m a little disappointed that she shows up here, and that these immigrant women are not the complete focus. Regardless of that minor critique, I highly recommend giving this book a go.

Sherbanoo’s Indian Cuisine: Tantalizing Tastes of the Indian Subcontinent

Taste Makers reminded me of Fargo-Moorhead’s own female food revolutionary, Sherbanoo Aziz. Sherbanoo was born in Mumbai, India and came to the United States when she was 38 years old. She’s been a local teacher of Indian cuisine for many years. We have her cookbook Sherbanoo’s Indian Cuisine: Tantalizing Tastes of the Indian Subcontinent available in our gift shop or on Amazon.

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If you’re interested in what else I’m reading you can follow me on Goodreads by following the link below. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9503549-emily

Want to read Taste Makers for FREE? Sign up for a library card today! Taste Makers is available to check out at both the Fargo and Moorhead Public Library (LARL).

Fargo Public Library Online Library Card Application: https://catalog.fargolibrary.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-memberentry.pl

Lake Agassiz Regional Library Online Application: https://larl.org/get-a-library-card/

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5 Must Read Books for Women's History Month

3/14/2022

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A Warrior of the People: How Susan La Flesche Overcame Racial and Gender Equality to Become America's First Indian Doctor

By Joe Starita
Published November 2016

On March 14, 1889, Susan La Flesche received her medical degree—becoming the first Native American doctor in U.S. history. She earned her degree thirty-one years before women could vote and thirty-five years before Indians could become citizens in their own country.

By age twenty-six, this fragile but indomitable Indian woman became the doctor to her tribe. Overnight, she acquired 1,244 patients scattered across 1,350 square miles of rolling countryside with few roads. Her patients often were desperately poor and desperately sick—tuberculosis, small pox, measles, influenza—families scattered miles apart, whose last hope was a young woman who spoke their language and knew their customs.

This is the story of an Indian woman who effectively became the chief of an entrenched patriarchal tribe, the story of a woman who crashed through thick walls of ethnic, racial and gender prejudice, then spent the rest of her life using a unique bicultural identity to improve the lot of her people—physically, emotionally, politically, and spiritually.

A Warrior of the People is the moving biography of Susan La Flesche’s inspirational life, and it will finally shine a light on her numerous accomplishments.

The author will donate all royalties from this book to a college scholarship fund he has established for Native American high school graduates.

A Black Women's History of the United States

By Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross
Published February 2020

A vibrant and empowering history that emphasizes the perspectives and stories of African American women to show how they are -- and have always been -- instrumental in shaping our country.

In centering Black women's stories, two award-winning historians seek both to empower African American women and to show their allies that Black women's unique ability to make their own communities while combatting centuries of oppression is an essential component in our continued resistance to systemic racism and sexism. Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross offer an examination and celebration of Black womanhood, beginning with the first African women who arrived in what became the United States to African American women of today.

A Black Women's History of the United States reaches far beyond a single narrative to showcase Black women's lives in all their fraught complexities. Berry and Gross prioritize many voices: enslaved women, freedwomen, religious leaders, artists, queer women, activists, and women who lived outside the law. The result is a starting point for exploring Black women's history and a testament to the beauty, richness, rhythm, tragedy, heartbreak, rage, and enduring love that abounds in the spirit of Black women in communities throughout the nation.

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Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger

By Rebecca Traister
Published October 2018

From Rebecca Traister, the New York Times bestselling author of All the Single Ladies comes a vital, incisive exploration into the transformative power of female anger and its ability to transcend into a political movement.

In the year 2018, it seems as if women’s anger has suddenly erupted into the public conversation. But long before Pantsuit Nation, before the Women’s March, and before the #MeToo movement, women’s anger was not only politically catalytic—but politically problematic. The story of female fury and its cultural significance demonstrates the long history of bitter resentment that has enshrouded women’s slow rise to political power in America, as well as the ways that anger is received when it comes from women as opposed to when it comes from men.

With eloquence and fervor, Rebecca tracks the history of female anger as political fuel—from suffragettes marching on the White House to office workers vacating their buildings after Clarence Thomas was confirmed to the Supreme Court. Here Traister explores women’s anger at both men and other women; anger between ideological allies and foes; the varied ways anger is perceived based on its owner; as well as the history of caricaturing and delegitimizing female anger; and the way women’s collective fury has become transformative political fuel—as is most certainly occurring today. She deconstructs society’s (and the media’s) condemnation of female emotion (notably, rage) and the impact of their resulting repercussions.

Highlighting a double standard perpetuated against women by all sexes, and its disastrous, stultifying effect, Traister’s latest is timely and crucial. It offers a glimpse into the galvanizing force of women’s collective anger, which, when harnessed, can change history.

They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in American South

By Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers
Published February 2019

Bridging women’s history, the history of the South, and African American history, this book makes a bold argument about the role of white women in American slavery. Historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers draws on a variety of sources to show that slave-owning women were sophisticated economic actors who directly engaged in and benefited from the South’s slave market. Because women typically inherited more slaves than land, enslaved people were often their primary source of wealth. Not only did white women often refuse to cede ownership of their slaves to their husbands, they employed management techniques that were as effective and brutal as those used by slave-owning men. White women actively participated in the slave market, profited from it, and used it for economic and social empowerment. By examining the economically entangled lives of enslaved people and slave-owning women, Jones-Rogers presents a narrative that forces us to rethink the economics and social conventions of slaveholding America.

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Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine

By Olivia Campbell
Published March 2021

For fans of Hidden Figures and Radium Girls comes the remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive healthcare.

In the early 1800s, women were dying in large numbers from treatable diseases because they avoided receiving medical care. Examinations performed by male doctors were often demeaning and even painful. In addition, women faced stigma from illness—a diagnosis could greatly limit their ability to find husbands, jobs or be received in polite society.

Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman’s place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same. Though very different in personality and circumstance, together these women built women-run hospitals and teaching colleges—creating for the first time medical care for women by women.

With gripping storytelling based on extensive research and access to archival documents, Women in White Coats tells the courageous history these women made by becoming doctors, detailing the boundaries they broke of gender and science to reshape how we receive medical care today.

Want to read these books for FREE? Sign up for a library card today! These books and many more are available to check out at both the Fargo and Moorhead Public Library (LARL).

Fargo Public Library Online Library Card Application: https://catalog.fargolibrary.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-memberentry.pl

Lake Agassiz Regional Library Online Application: https://larl.org/get-a-library-card/

**Book cover images, descriptions, and other information was acquired from Goodreads**

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Book Review of the Month: March 2022

3/1/2022

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How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Book by Clint Smith, published June 1, 2021
Book review by Emily Kulzer, HCSCC Director of Museum Operations

“I’ve come to realize that there is a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory.” – David Thornton, Tour Guide, Monticello Plantation, p. 41

The connection between history, memory, and the present day has always fascinated me. Why do we remember the events and people that we do? Who gets to decide what makes it into the history books? How do dominant narratives of the past shape the places that we live, the people around us, and who we are? Why do we often look back at the past with a feeling of nostalgia and think “those were the good ol’ days”?

I think most people like to believe that history is a factual account of what has happened in the past. But the more I learn about and study history, the more it becomes evident that history, and the memories tied to it, comes with a lot of emotional baggage.

Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia contains a mass grave of 30,000 Confederates who were killed in the Siege of Petersburg during the American Civil War. The stone arch above the entrance road reads “Our Confederate Heroes.” In 1866, Blandford was the site of one of the earliest known Decoration Day ceremonies, which many believe to be the inspiration for the Memorial Day. Smith attended the annual Sons of Confederate Veterans Memorial Celebration at the site which still takes place every Memorial Day. Image Source: Noah_Loverbear, CC BY-SA 3.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

In How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, author Clint Smith takes readers on a nation-wide tour of plantations, memorials, museums, cemeteries, and prisons and examines how each site memorializes and reckons with the legacy of slavery.

Smith’s accounts of each site are based on historical scholarship and brought to life by the story of the people who care for and interpret these historical sites today. Each site is a case study that reveals how historians are choosing to tackle difficult history. Some sites choose to face the past head on, they dig it up with the ugly truth and bring it to the surface. Other sites prefer to keep the ugly parts of the past buried.

The thing that I admire most about this book is the way that Smith combines historical scholarship and journalism. It reads like a history book, yet it’s more personal. During his investigations, Smith starts up conversations with visitors, tour guides, and administrators at each site and asks them thoughtful questions regarding their understanding of the legacy of slavery and how it is told at the site.

I think it’s easy to judge others who might not know about or who might choose to ignore the messy parts of the past. Especially when we live in an age where we have access to so much knowledge and the ability to connect with people from all over the world. How the Word is Passed offers a thorough and thought-provoking investigation of the differing understandings of the horrors of slavery and those who fought to keep it.

Louisiana State Penitentiary quarters, ca. 1901. Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as Angola, is a historic maximum-security prison farm that is still in operation today. It is named Angola after the former plantation that was at the same location, and for the African country from which came many of the people who were kidnapped and enslaved in Louisiana. In How the Word is Passed, Smith visits the prison’s on-site museum to discover how they confront their ties to slavery. Source: State Library of Louisiana Digital Repository

One of the goals that the staff and I here at HCSCC have is to have deeper conversations with our audiences and create more thought-provoking content. Learning about how other historical sites around the United States and the world is a great way to find out what is working for other museums. I found the case studies in this book helpful, not only as a public historian, but personally as well. I always strive to understand my fellow humans in the hopes that I can better understand myself and become a more compassionate and empathetic person. I recommend this book not only to my fellow historians but to anyone wanting to know more about impact that the legacy of slavery has had on our society.

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Now, this is the part where I make a shameless pitch for the new exhibit that we have coming up. I invite you all to join us on Tuesday, March 22 at 5:00 PM for the opening reception of one of the three (yes, I said THREE) new exhibits that we have opening in March. Stories of Local Black History examines the rich history of African-American and African people in Clay County and the surrounding areas. The exhibit travels through time, highlighting some of the most fascinating and influential people to live in our community, like Civil War veteran Felix Battles, professor and jazz musician James Condell, as well as Judge and former Mayor of Moorhead, Jonathan Judd.

We hope to see you there!

If you’re interested in what else I’m reading you can follow me on Goodreads by following the link below. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/9503549-emily

Want to read How the Word is Passed for FREE? Sign up for a library card today! How the Word Is Passed is available to check out at both the Fargo and Moorhead Public Library (LARL).

Fargo Public Library Online Library Card Application: https://catalog.fargolibrary.org/cgi-bin/koha/opac-memberentry.pl

Lake Agassiz Regional Library Online Application: https://larl.org/get-a-library-card/

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The Stockwood Fill

3/18/2021

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The Stockwood Fill:
Lake Agassiz and the Northern Pacific Railway
Mark Peihl
March 16, 2021

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On Tuesday, March 16, 2021, HCSCC senior archivist Mark Peihl delivered a lecture exploring railroad construction through the unique landscape and geology of the Red River Valley. As the ancient, glacial Lake Agassiz drained away thousands of years ago, a rich prairie with a complex soils took its place. The Northern Pacific Railway learned this geology the hard way between 1906 and 1909 while building a railroad grade between Glyndon and Hawley, Minnesota. The steep beach ridges of an ancient lake presented a formidable challenge.

A recording has been made available on our YouTube channel.

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38 Days of Sub-Zero Winter

2/16/2021

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Image: a winter photograph of twelve people standing outside of the Moorhead Post Office in 1915.

Moorhead was an official U.S. Weather Bureau Observation station from the 1880s through the 1940s. In 1920, Bureau observers moved into the Moorhead Post Office, pictured here in 1915 (HCSCC).

38 Days of Sub-Zero Temps:
Clay County's 1936 Winter Still Coldest on Record
Mark Peihl
February 16, 2021

(adapted from CCHS Newsletter, January/February 1993)

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On Tuesday morning, January 14, 1936, local U.S. Weather Bureau observer Roy J. McClure received a telegraphic message from Washington at his office in the Moorhead Post Office (today The Rourke Art Gallery + Museum). A severe cold wave was approaching Clay County from the northwest. McClure quickly phoned the local radio stations and newspapers with the warning and made his way to City Hall on 5th Street and Center Avenue. McClure ran a square white flag with a black square in the middle of it up the flag pole — the weather bureau's official signal to warn citizens of a cold wave. It had already been a cold winter. November was the fourth coldest on record and the temperature had not been above freezing since December 15. Just the previous week the county had been stung with twenty-below weather. It must have been cold raising that flag. The temperature was 1°F with a 12 mile per hour wind. But little did McClure know that it would be six long weeks before Clay County would enjoy such balmy weather again.

Image: a chart showing five weather flags used by the U.S. Weather Bureau. The white flag indicated fair or clear weather. A Blue flag indicated rain or snow. A white and blue flag indicated local rain and snow. A black triangular flag indicated a temperature extreme. A white flag with a black square indicated the approach of a cold wave.

For 38 days between January 15 and February 20 the temperature at Moorhead never reached above zero, the longest such streak in the county's history. Eight times morning lows reached -30°F, twice it hit -37°F, and three blizzards added to the fiasco. It all helped to make the winter of 1936 the coldest on record.

The first week of the cold snap was not that bad. Lows were around -15°F and highs about -5°F, and winds were light. Newspapers hardly mentioned the cold. But Tuesday afternoon, January 21, the bottom dropped out. By midnight the temperature was -37°F with a 15 mile per hour wind. That's a wind chill of -85 degrees. The high that day was -29°F.

Few folks in Moorhead bothered to try starting their cars and fewer succeeded. Packed city buses managed to stay on schedule, but the Fargo-Moorhead Electric Street Railway routes were completely disorganized. The intense cold created a frosty film on the street car tracks. Without adequate traction it took the cars an hour to complete a 45-minute loop.

Taxi cabs raced the deserted streets getting people to work and stores. Many folks waited an hour for a ride. The Fargo companies raised their fares from 15 cents to 25 cents and still did a booming business.

Moorhead Judge N.I. Johnson bought a thermometer at a local hardware store, stepped outside and watched astonished as its mercury plummeted 102 degrees in moments.

Most people just stayed home and talked on the phone. Northwestern Bell put on all the operators they had and could not handle the estimated 12,000 calls placed between 7:30 and 9 a.m., four times the normal load. Most of the calls were to cab companies or about school. Classes were held but attendance was off by a third.

Conditions in the country were worse. Thermometers near Ulen hit -42°F and Downer residents reported -38°F for a high on Wednesday. J.B. Olsen from Hawley had to melt snow for his 16 head of stock when his well froze. Most rural schools closed for the week. Drifts blocked many township roads. A lot of snow had already fallen that winter. It was light and dry and blew like crazy with even a moderate wind. North of Georgetown WPA workers added blocks of snow to increase the height of a snow fence, but 10 foot drifts piled up anyway.

On Saturday, after three days of minus thirty, the temperature "moderated" for 10 days. It even reached zero a couple of times. But on Tuesday, February 4, a strong north wind brought back frigid air. On Friday, highs edged up to -12°F and snow started to fall. By Sunday an additional 4.5 inches had fallen and blown sideways.

City, state, and county road crews worked round the clock to keep main routes open, but most rural roads were clocked. The Hitterdal and Felton areas were particularly hard hit with 12 to 14 foot drifts. The Fargo Forum reported drifts "packed hard as concrete" by the wind. Crews used dynamite to clear some North Dakota roads.

By Wednesday things were more under control. Then it started snowing again. Frustrated road crewmen sat as "canyons" they had spent half a day digging out fIlled in an hour with new white stuff.

On Friday the weather cleared and the temp plummeted to -37°F again. The Moorhead Daily News joked that the only break Moorheadites got from shoveling coal into their furnaces was to run upstairs and phone for more coal. In Iowa, fuel became so short that armed guards were posted on coal trains. There was no such problem here. Most Clay County coal came from dock storage facilities at Duluth or open pit mines in North Dakota and Montana. Local coal dealers reported their business up by 25 to 75% over normal, but except for a couple of popular grades there was plenty to go around. However, at Hitterdal and Ulen, where snow blockedrail deliveries for a time, dealers limited what they would sell.

As furnaces stoked up, chimney fires became common. Moorhead fire fighters fought three fires on one -37°F night.

On Sunday, the third blizzard in less than 10 days struckand Clay County residents had had enough. The Moorhead Country Press said that old timers' stories of how cold it was in the old days were getting a lot less interesting. A Spring Prairie resident complained that his neighbors talked of nothing except coal, cold weather and firewood.

With their customers marooned at home by snow and cold, merchants reported business was terrible. The previous fall male students at Moorhead State Teachers College had started a fad of going about hatless. The -30°F weather stopped that fast. Half the residents of Ulen had to haul water when their pipes froze. Although hundreds died around the country from the cold, Clay County recorded only one death. On January 22, WPA worker Gerald Payseno tried fixing a tire in a closed garage with his truck's motor running. He was overcome by exhaust fumes.

Wildlife suffered terribly. Newspapers carried stories about woodpeckers frozen to trees, chickadees stuck to iron pipes, and even a rabbit found with his tongue on an ax head. Residents reported pheasants flocking in farmyards. Local game warden Robert Streich said 1936 was the worst year for wildlife he had ever seen and predicted the weather would set back pheasant production by five years. Streich pleaded with farmers to set out feed for game birds. Local Rod and Gun Clubs raised funds for bird feed. Streich himself speared 1000 pounds of rough fish at the north Red River Dam to feed pheasants. The ice on the river froze 36 inches deep and several small lakes winter-killed completely.

County residents grimly dug out again and hung on. Finally, on Friday, February 21, thermometers registered at a sizzling 8°F. Soon after, 32°F weather brought a sleet storm that turned roads to ice and yet another blizzard followed, but the back was finally broken on the grand daddy of all Clay County cold waves.

When the previous record for extended sub-zero weather was broken (a wimpy 11 days in 1889) the Moorhead Daily News editorialized "already youngsters of 1936 are being taught the momentous news, so that in the dimfuture when they achieve the status of grandfathers they can chuckle over a younger generation complaining about cold weather, saying: 'Now when I was a lad .... '"

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Paranormal North: A History Podcast

1/5/2021

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Paranormal North
Davin Wait
January 5, 2021

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My good friend Matt Hopper, a talented producer with Forum Communications, first approached me about collaborating on a podcast in 2018 or '19. I frequently resisted these invitations, as I'd already spread my time fairly thin between various projects at HCSCC and some volunteering responsibilities elsewhere in the community. Of course, outside of a select few podcasts on road trips or morning walks (like Backstory or Revisionist History), I've also never been much of a podcast listener. I'm more apt to listen to public radio, YouTube documentaries, or some type of innocuous background music while I work. When I drive or workout, it's music or silence.

However, when COVID-19 entered our lives in March 2020 and temporarily closed our museum at the Hjemkomst Center, my colleagues and I were forced to confront a new reality. Our positions at the museum were generally safe — which was not the case for many of our museum colleagues around the U.S. — but we needed to find new ways to connect with our audiences. So once we navigated the challenges of reopening the museum in June (before we closed again in November) and moving staff meetings and programs into digital spaces, Matt and I decided to give it a shot.

Paranormal North is the result of this collaboration. We researched and scripted the episodes through August and September, both at work and in our own free time. Then we recorded and edited at WDAY studios before publishing them through inForum in October and November — just before COVID-19 visited me and my girlfriend (we're both okay). Our content drew from new research and research that my colleagues and I have conducted intermittently over the last several years, particularly for a small local folklore exhibition called Weird FM that we shared alongside an exhibition of SuperMonster市City!'s America's Monsters, Superheroes, and Villains: Our Culture At Play in the fall and winter of 2019. We wanted the podcast, like both of these exhibitions, to provide historical context and interpretation for some of the local legends in the Red River Valley. We wanted to know, what are our local legends, why do we tell these strange stories, and where do they come from?

After producing four episodes we've certainly identified some ways we can improve our storytelling in this new medium, but the feedback we've received has been overwhelmingly positive. We've had thousands of listeners, and dozens of folks have reached out to share kind words or suggest upcoming episodes (we haven't decided the podcast's future, yet). Will we do a deep dive into the Kindred Lights or the Wendigo, for example? What about Nisse or Trolls?

Of course, we've also encountered a little pushback, including a charge that Paranormal North deflates local legends and ruins a small slice of fun in our community. When I first read this accusation, it reminded me of valid ethical concerns I had about leading elementary and high school students on tours through Weird FM and America's Monsters, Superheroes, and Villains. I wondered, could I tactfully introduce the folklore of German and Scandinavian immigrants, including Krampus and Saint Nick, without peeling back the curtains on, say.....Santa Claus? Could I frame one of the central arguments of America's Monsters, Superheroes, and Villains — that the pop culture stories we tell and the ways we play are intrinsically tied to the material realities of history, psychology, and biology — without explicitly casting zombies, Superman, and the Marvel Universe into the shadows of the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and Jim Crow? Where do we draw these lines as journalists, educators, and historians — especially since we're not just talking about stories, but storytellers and audiences?

I'm skeptical of supernatural and paranormal phenomena. I trust hard evidence and the scientific method and professional consensus. I am sympathetic to the fallibility of humans and science, and I push back against the ridicule that True Believers face, but I'm perhaps more sympathetic to the feedback I've received suggesting that magical thinking primes us for propaganda, hoaxes, and conspiracy theories.

To put this another way, I personally don't think of ghosts or flying reindeer when I hear a noise in the attic, but Christmas and Halloween are still a magical time in my house.

Have a listen and tell us what you think.

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Click to play/download.

Episode 1 - The Vergas Hairy Man

Episode 2 - The Val Johnson Incident

Episode 3 - The Wild Plum Schoolhouse Poltergeist

Episode 4 - The Horace Mann Elephant

Paranormal North is produced in collaboration by the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County and Forum Communications.

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Grasshoppers in Clay County

10/8/2020

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Drought and grasshoppers, like those shown here, plagued farmers in the Red River Valley during the 1930s (OPI-WPA Photos, Library of Congress).

Grasshoppers in Clay County
Mark Peihl
October 8, 2020

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As in the rest of the area, outbreaks of the Rocky Mountain Locust devastated crops in Clay County between 1874 and 1876. Huge swarms of the pests swept through the area eating crops, grass, trees – even laundry hung on lines. Farmers tried burning, plowing, capturing and stomping the hoppers but nothing seemed to work. Eventually they disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. Ironically, the trillions of Rocky Mountain Locusts which caused so much damage are now extinct.

But five other hopper species have given local farmers fits. The hot, dry years of the 1930s proved perfect breeding environments for the bugs. Between 1932 and 1939 the hoppers caused millions of dollars in crop damage in Clay County.

Grasshoppers devastated Clay County fields in the 1930s, causing millions of dollars in crop losses. This photo shows the remains of a cornfield (OPI-WPA Photos, Library of Congress).

However, this time farmers had an effective weapon – poison. Workers mixed wheat bran, molasses and saw dust with water and sodium arsenate and spread it on fields just as the hoppers hatched. The insects ate the sweetened bran and died by the billions.

Farmers in Warren, Minnesota, mix grasshopper poison in the 1930s. Sodium arsenate, molasses, and wheat bran were mixed into troughs of saw dust for spreading on fields (Grasshoppers and Their Control, 1938).

The arsenic used was hazardous, causing respiratory problems, skin damage, and much worse. Unfortunately many farmers mixed and spread this grasshopper poison by hand, with little if any personal protection. Sodium arsenate was later outlawed for these purposes. In the 1980s the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency discovered 18,000 pounds of arsenic still stored on a half dozen Clay County farms. The poison was removed to a hazardous waste disposal site.

In the 1980s the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency discovered and disposed of thousands of pounds of arsenic-laced grasshopper poison still stored on Clay County farms, including the stockpile shown here (Clay County Extension Agent's Annual Report, 1938).

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How HCSCC Selects Traveling Exhibitions

9/10/2020

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Image: a photograph of HCSCC's 2017 exhibition of

A photograph of HCSCC's 2017 exhibition of "Illuminating the Word: The Saint John's Bible."

How We Select Traveling Exhibitions at HCSCC
Emily Kulzer
September 10, 2020

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When you visit the Hjemkomst Center or other museums, you might not think about all of the things that happen behind the scenes to make the exhibitions happen. Here is a sneak peak of the process of acquiring traveling exhibitions.

As the Director of Museum Operations, one of my primary responsibilities is Traveling Exhibits Registrar. This means that I am responsible for selecting, scheduling, and shipping all of the traveling exhibits that come through the Hjemkomst Center. I am always on the search for new traveling exhibitions. There are many companies around the world who specialize in producing traveling exhibitions for museums big and small. I am subscribed to e-newsletters from a multitude of exhibit development companies and museums who travel their exhibits, so I am notified as soon as a new exhibit goes on tour and I see many that are in development.

When looking at traveling exhibits there are a few different things that I think about:

HCSCC’s Mission and Values
Our mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and share the history and culture of Clay County. There are very few traveling exhibits that exclusively examine or mention the history of Clay County, Minnesota. The only exceptions being traveling exhibits from the Minnesota Historical Society and other Minnesota museums. Because the options are limited, I look at different aspects of Clay County history that a potential traveling exhibit can connect to. These aspects include agriculture, the Midwest, railroad history, Native American history, Scandinavian-American history, black history, the histories of immigration, and so many more.

Apart from our mission, we also have a set of values that we use to guide our decisions. Here we value diversity and inclusion, accessibility, and community partnerships.

Diversity & Inclusion
Clay County is very fortunate to have such a diverse community. People from all over the globe call Clay County home, as well as people from all religions, abilities, gender identities, and sexual orientations. It is very important that when selecting traveling exhibits that this diversity shows through and everyone has a chance to be represented. In the future, I look forward to booking more exhibits that examine African American history, Latinx history, the history of people with disabilities, and the history of the LGBTQIA+ community.

Accessibility
HCSCC has been working with Sherry Shirek, an accessibility consultant and co-founder of Arts Access for All, for many years. Sherry has taught us to be more aware of how accessible our museum is for our guests with all physical and mental abilities. If an exhibit is not as accessible as it could be, I look at how easily we can add accessible features like large font text booklets, audio description, or braille.

Community Partnerships
We love collaborating with other arts organizations, nonprofits, and local businesses. In the past our collaborations included sponsorships, cross-promotion of events, hiring local businesses to serve food or drinks at exhibit receptions, hosting history events at local restaurants and breweries, and volunteering. Last year, we started a partnership with the League of Women Voters of the Red River Valley to plan events for the centennial of the 19th Amendment and to include their chapter’s history in a women’s suffrage exhibit this fall.

Cost
The cost of the exhibit is a big part of the decision making process. Traveling exhibitions range in cost from a few hundred dollars for small exhibits to over $50,000 for large exhibits. Some of the exhibits are worth the price and some are not, so it is important to weigh the options. HCSCC is fortunate to have a nice sized exhibit budget, thanks to community sponsors and grants.

Size
Exhibit size is the most limiting aspect when selecting traveling exhibits. HCSCC has 5 exhibit galleries in the museum that vary in square footage and ceiling height. We can’t accommodate exhibits that require much more than 2,000 square feet in our main traveling exhibit galleries. When matching exhibits to galleries, I think about the exhibit layout and design, For example, the lower ceiling height of the 4th floor gallery creates a more intimate environment which makes it ideal for art exhibits and exhibits which might invoke deep thought and contemplation. The 4th floor gallery also offers the most security, as it can be closed off and monitored easily. The hall cases on the third floor are most often used to showcase artifacts from the HCSCC collection, poster exhibitions, and student work.

Availability
Traveling exhibits are always in high demand so it is important to book them early. I like to book exhibits as far as 4 years into the future. This gives us ample time to come up with supplemental programs and think of community partnerships.

Programming
One of my favorite parts of hosting traveling exhibits is the potential variety of programs that we can offer to our community. A new exhibit comes into the museum at least once every quarter, and that means we always have new content to base programs off of. The three major universities in the metro area provide us with an abundance of scholars who can speak on a variety of topics. Recent programs included the epidemiology of the 1918 Spanish Flu and the role of local women’s clubs in the women’s suffrage movement.

Interest
Lastly, and most importantly is interest. Pleasing our guests, members, and donors is one of our top priorities. If people aren’t interested in the topic, they won’t visit the museum. To gauge community interest, I pay close attention to current events, museum trends, and visitor survey feedback.

With that, I would love to hear from you! Please leave me some feedback in the comments section below. What exhibits have you loved in the past and why? What do you hope to see from us in the future? Do you want more “behind the scenes” content? I look forward to reading your responses.

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Moorhead Women's Suffrage Walking Tour

8/26/2020

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Moorhead Woman’s Suffrage Walking Tour
The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County
August 26, 2020

It's been 100 years since the United States formally adopted the 19th Amendment, allowing (many) women to vote. We're commemorating this moment by highlighting the local organizers and activists who worked for women's suffrage.

Download our tour and take a walk through Moorhead history.

Audio Download

Transcript (PDF)

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Welcome to the Moorhead Woman’s Suffrage Walking tour brought to you by the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. This tour will take us through some of Moorhead’s most beautiful and historic neighborhoods as we learn about local women and men who were involved in the struggle to gain voting rights for American women. The stops are usually only a block or two apart and by the end of it you will have walked just about two miles. Feel free to pause this recording between stops or for breaks.

First, a short introduction. The United States of America was founded as a nation that would be governed of the people, by the people, and for the people. A flier in our museum collection from Fargo Suffragist Clara Dillon Darrow asked “are women not people?” Women did not have voting rights, and by the mid-1800s, women were organizing to correct this. They called it the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, suffrage meaning the right to vote. They called themselves Suffragists, though today we tend to remember them as the Suffragettes, a word invented by their enemies and intended to be demeaning. Whether you call them Suffragists or Suffragettes, you have to admire them for changing our country for the better, and some of those American heroines lived right here in our town.

The fight for Woman’s Suffrage was waged state by state. Legislators in Wyoming Territory were the first to recognize the voting rights of women in 1869. Over the following decades, Women gained full voting rights in a patchwork of mostly western states, and limited voting rights in others. But the Suffragists were persistent and increasingly impossible to ignore. On May 21, 1919, the House of Representatives approved a proposed 19th Amendment to the Constitution that would make it illegal to restrict voting rights of Americans on the basis of sex. The US Senate approved it two weeks later, and it was off to the state legislatures to vote on. It needed the approval of 36 states to pass. Minnesota ratified the Amendment on September 8, North Dakota ratified it on December 4, and finally, on August 26, 1920, the Amendment became the law of the land.

The Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association had branches in towns and counties throughout the state, organized by legislative district and run by women who held the title of chairmen. Legislative District 49 was centered in Moorhead and we had four or five chairmen at a time. Admittedly, the story of the struggle for Woman’s Suffrage in Minnesota is centered in and dominated by St. Paul and MInneapolis, but our Moorhead Suffragists were just across the river from Fargo, which was the center of the lively and active Suffrage fight in North Dakota. This tour relies on a list of names of women and men from our area that are found in the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association archive at the Minnesota Historical Society, but those records tell us little about what these Suffragists did in their various roles in Moorhead. So on this tour, we will not be focusing on what these people did, but on who these people were, and how they represented different aspects of the Woman’s Suffrage Movement.

Time to go to stop number 1: The Comstock House at 506 8th Street South. If you’re not there yet, feel free to pause this recording until you get there.

Stop 1: 506 8th St S
The Comstock House

Our first stop is the Comstock House, a Minnesota HIstorical Society site operated in partnership with the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. Feel free to walk around, we like having you here. This was the home of Solomon and Sarah Comstock, and their children Ada, Jesse and George. For the first half century of our town’s existence, the Comstock family was the most influential family in Moorhead, socially, economically, and politically. It is a common trend across our nation that Suffragists tended to be women of means whose families were community leaders at the top of the social and economic ladder in town, and if you are looking at the front door of the Comstock House, you can see the stately home of the most important Suffrage family in town - as long as you turn around and look at the brown house across 8th Street - Mary and Frank Peterson are the most important family of Moorhead’s Womans’ Suffrage movement - don’t worry, we’ll get to them later. The Comstocks, as far as we can tell, did not engage in the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, at least not publicly. But we stop here because while the Comstocks may not have talked the talk of Suffrage, they certainly did walk the walk of women’s equality.

Sarah Comstock was a teacher before she came to the two year old Wild West town of Moorhead in 1874 and married an ambitious young attorney named Solomon. Solomon rose from county attorney to state representative to US Congressman to the business associate of railroad magnate James J. Hill, the richest man in Minnesota. This gave the family a lot of political and economic influence, and perhaps the most important way they used this influence is they turned Moorhead into a college town. Minnesota State University Moorhead and Concordia College are both here because of the Comstocks, and one of the common themes that you’ll see throughout this tour is Suffragists were overwhelmingly educated women at a time when educating women wasn’t common. Sarah and Solomon’s two daughters and one son received wonderful educations, and oldest daughter Ada became a nationally famous pioneer in the field of women’s education. It would be hard to imagine that Ada Comstock, who as president of Radcliffe College helped turn all-male Harvard co-ed, wouldn’t want the right to vote. There are buildings named for this family at Minnesota State University Moorhead, Concordia College, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, Smith College and Radcliffe College.

And there’s another reason we begin our tour here. In this house, in 1893, the leading women of town formed The Moorhead Woman’s Club. Two years later, the Moorhead Women’s Club would become one of the 15 charter members of the Minnesota Federation of Women’s Clubs - which would eventually grow to 500 chapters with 40,000 members. Woman’s Clubs were creative and intellectual outlets for women as well as centers of civic engagement. Each year, a club would choose a topic to study - Moorhead’s 1893 topic was Ancient Egypt, the 1906-7 season’s topic was Italian Sculpture and Painting in the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth Centuries, and the group studied Panama and South America in 1913-14. The members wrote essays, recited poems, and performed music on that theme, hosting each other in their homes on a rotating basis. Membership in the Moorhead Women’s Club was limited to 25 women plus a list of inactive honorary members, so being a member was an indication that you are a woman of culture from a well-connected family in town. It should not surprise you that many Suffragists were members of these clubs of educated, civic minded, community leaders. That goes for Moorhead or any American town.

Before we leave the Comstock House, we should mention that there was an important local Suffragist in this family. Ruth Roberts Haggart was the daughter of Sarah’s sister Jennie and her husband Samuel Roberts. Ruth was an officer in the North Dakota Votes for Women League and she hosted a series of Suffrage Teas and dinner socials in Fargo to get local women interested in the movement.

Our next stop is not far away. Go out the front gate and take a left to walk south along 8th Street. You’ll see a new brick building with a black sign that says Comstock Commons - 600 8th St South.

Stop 2: 600 8th St S: Comstock Commons,
The former site of the Esther Russell House

Comstock Commons is built on top of where Esther Russell used to live. I want to say that Esther Russell is your typical Woman’s Suffrage leader, but the word “typical” doesn’t seem to apply to an impressive woman like Esther Russell. But then again, the Woman’s Suffrage movement regularly attracted impressive people. Esther was one of four chairmen of our branch of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association and she must have done a good job because on the organization’s list entitled “Prominent Minnesota Suffrage Workers,” Esther is one of only 16 people living outside the Twin Cities.

Esther Russell grew up in Marshall, Minnesota, the daughter of a carpenter. She became a teacher before marrying William Russell. William became a prominent Moorhead attorney, and in American society back then, that meant his wife Esther also had the opportunity to be prominent in Moorhead society. She took that opportunity.

Esther was also the head of our local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, or WCTU. The Temperance Movement was an international movement to get people to stop drinking alcohol, and it was absolutely intertwined with the Woman’s Suffrage Movement. America in the 19th century had a drinking problem. Women got fed up with their husbands spending their evenings and money in saloons, where women were not allowed to enter, often coming home violently drunk in an era when it was difficult for women to escape abusive relationships. For their children, their sisters and themselves, many American women became politically active for the first time as Temperance advocates. Through the Temperance Movement, generations of women learned how to organize to get legislation passed. They developed working relationships with legislators, and they started getting more and more annoyed that they were not allowed to vote for these laws they were promoting. And their male allies in the Temperance Movement also knew that if women could vote it would be so much easier to get anti-alcohol laws passed. The Temperance and Woman’s Suffrage movements were intertwined a century ago not unlike how the topics of Abortion and Gun Control are today.

But this merger of movements did have a downside. A lot of families, especially in Moorhead, owed their livelihoods to the alcohol industry. Local Saloon-owning families like the Kiefers, Ingersols, Magnussons, and Diemerts shared many traits of the Suffragist families on this tour: they were prominent business leaders, they were active in local politics, they sent daughters to college to become teachers, but you don’t see their names on the rolls of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association. I don’t think we should necessarily take this to mean that Emma Magnuson wanted fewer rights than Esther Russell did, but I can certainly understand if she wouldn’t want to be in the same room as the woman who is trying to make their family’s business illegal.

Off to the next stop, which is 906 7th Street South. Keep walking south along 8th Street until you get to the stoplights on 7th Avenue South. Turn left and walk to the end of the block. Across the street should be a two-story cream-colored house with red trim.

Stop 3: 906 7th Ave S
The Anna Gates House

While Esther Russell embodied many of the attributes common to American Suffrage fighters, Anna Gates was in many ways an outlier, though both served as Chairmen of District 49’s Minnesota Woman’s Suffrage Association at the same time.

Anna is the only immigrant on our list of local women involved in the Minnesota Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was born Anna Liedahl in Norway. She crossed the ocean to America at the age of nine in 1881. Her family settled near Leonard, North Dakota, about 40 miles southwest of Moorhead.

She moved to Moorhead after meeting and marrying a letter carrier named Elbert Gates - which is another difference between her and Esther Russell: the Gates were working class.

Soon after Suffrage was achieved, Anna Gates herself went to work. She became Moorhead’s first female police officer. Her official title was Police Matron, and today we would think of her as part cop, part social worker, part city food inspector. Officer Gates was called in to handle cases where the suspects were either women or children. She also organized the city’s charity drives to provide food and clothing to impoverished families during the Great Depression.

While Gates served as a chairman in Moorhead, she also did quite a lot of collaboration with the very active grassroots Woman’s Suffrage organizations in North Dakota. On October 8, 1914, the Wahpeton Times reported that she was working for suffrage while visiting her relatives back home: “Mrs. Anna Gates of Moorhead, Minnesota, who has been doing quite a little quiet work for suffrage among the farm women near Leonard reports a very encouraging prospect for suffrage in that region.” She was not a member of the Moorhead Woman’s Club, but was instead an officer in the Fargo Progressive Club. As part of that group in 1912, Anna was one of the women in charge of bringing nationally-known Women’s rights icon Jane Addams to Fargo.

We’ll learn a little more about some Fargo Suffragists at our next stop - turn around and walk back towards 8th Street. Cross over to the west side of 8th at the light and keep walking down 7th Avenue south until you’re in front of two large Concordia College Dorms called Bogstad Manor East and Bogstad Manor West.

Stop 4: 618 7th St S: Bogstad Manor East
Formerly the Edith Darrow Godfrey House

A century ago, there would have been a hospital where Bogstad Manor West is today, and Bogstad Manor East would have been a row of fine houses lining 8th Street. In one of those houses lived the founder of the hospital, Doctor Daniel C. Darrow and his wife Alice. Right next door to them, just about directly across the street of Esther Russell, lived their daughter Edith Darrow Godfrey, who was a chairman of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association.

Edith grew up the daughter of one of Moorhead’s most respected families. Her father was a pioneer doctor who moved to Moorhead to join his brother, Fargo physician Dr. E. M. Darrow soon after he graduated medical school in 1884. Edith’s mother Alice was one of the founding members of the Moorhead Woman’s Club. In 1899, Edith Darrow married a promising young businessman named Joseph V. Godfrey. Joseph V. Godfrey’s name is written all over town even today, but you have to look down to see it. He had a concrete business and you’ll see his maker’s stamp on sidewalks throughout Moorhead’s older neighborhoods. We are walking on his sidewalks all through this tour. Joseph and Edith had two children - a boy and a girl. But in January of 1911, Joseph got a flu that turned into pneumonia. He died at the age of 36, leaving Edith a young widow with a ten year old son and a two year old daughter. Joseph’s obituary called him “one of the best known and best liked citizens of Moorhead.”

Edith Darrow Godfrey came from one of our region’s most prominent suffrage families. Her aunt in Fargo was Clara Dillon Darrow. Clara Darrow was one of the earliest and strongest voices for Woman’s Suffrage in North Dakota, a woman who gave suffrage speeches to prairie homesteaders and was the founding president of the North Dakota Votes for Women League in 1912. Clara’s daughters Mary Darrow Weibel and Elizabeth Darrow O’Neil were also active in North Dakota’s suffrage movement, and so was their little brother Daniel. When Edith’s husband passed away, Cousin Mary, Aunt Clara, and her parents were all with her at his bedside.

Our next stop is not far away. As you walk west toward the river down 7th Avenue South take a right on the first sidewalk you see. You’ll walk past the parking lot of Bogstad Manor West and on the other side of the black gate you’ll be on 7th Street South. We’re looking for a white house with blue trim: 515 7th Street South.

Stop 5: 515 7th St S
The Bessie Lewis House

Here we have the house of Minnesota Woman Suffrage Chairman Bessie Lewis. She served as chairman at the same time as her friend and neighbor Edith Darrow Godfrey. Bessie’s husband Thomas Lewis was one of the pall bearers at Joseph V. Godfrey’s funeral. Tom Lewis sold wholesale groceries. Bessie was a teacher. Census records indicate that she may have taken some time off of teaching to raise her three children, but by 1920 both she and her youngest daughter Flora, a recent graduate of Moorhead Normal School, were both working as teachers. Being a teacher was a common profession for Moorhead’s Suffragists, perhaps not surprising since the primary purpose of Moorhead Normal School was training teachers. That school is now called Minnesota State University Moorhead, and it still trains a lot of teachers. Bessie was also an accomplished embroiderer. She won two first prize ribbons at the Minnesota State Fair for her embroidery.

On September 8th, 1919, the Minnesota Legislature voted on a proposed 19th Amendment to the Constitution that would make it illegal to restrict an American Citizen’s right to vote based on their sex. Bessie and Thomas Lewis had a big party at their house that day, but not because Minnesota ratified the amendment. That day also happened to be their 25th wedding anniversary, and about 20 of their friends and neighbors threw them a surprise party.

To reach our next stop, keep walking to the end of the block and take a right on 5th Avenue South. When you reach 8th Street, the large brown and stucco house on your right will be 721 5th Avenue South.

Stop 6: 721 5th Ave S
The Mary B. and Frank H. Peterson House
You’ve seen this house before when you were standing at the entrance of the Comstock House. This used to be the home of Mary B. Peterson and her husband, Minnesota State Senator Frank H. Peterson. The house is now split into apartments and the building’s entrance has changed from the Peterson’s front door facing 8th Street to their side door on 5th Avenue. Mary Peterson was one of the four district chairmen of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association and a frequent donor to the cause. She was one of the founding members of the Moorhead Woman’s Club in 1893. And her husband Frank was a leading Progressive in the Minnesota State Senate.

Most of this tour has been talking about how regular people in a prairie town played a small role in the larger fight for voting rights, but this house is the exception. In 1922, after voting rights were won, the National Woman Suffrage Association published an official six-volume history of how it all happened. The chapter written by the Minnesota Suffragists singles out Senator Frank H. Peterson as being one of the most important legislators working on behalf of Woman’s Suffrage - the most important being Otter Tail County’s Ole Segang, whose nickname at in St. Paul was “The Napoleon of Woman’s Suffrage.”

Senator Peterson’s work for suffrage was related to his life’s calling of getting people to stop drinking alcohol. It is likely that Senator Peterson worked hard to give women the right to vote because he believed it was the right thing to do, but politicians like Peterson also hoped that women would add votes to the Temperance cause.

The jury is out over whether the Temperance cause helped Woman’s Suffrage or hindered it. To use modern political jargon, it brought out the base but it also energized the opposition. Fearing women voters would bring about Prohibition, the liquor industry fought tooth and nail to prevent women from gaining the right to vote. Senator Peterson saw Woman’s Suffrage bills come before the Minnesota legislature five times between 1909 and 1917, and each time the Suffragists lost by only four or fewer votes in the senate. Each time the opposition to the bills was led by senators connected to the liquor industry. But in January of 1919, the passage of the 18th Amendment to the United States Constitution made alcohol illegal throughout the whole country and brought about national Prohibition. As soon as Woman’s Suffrage was uncoupled from the alcohol debate and could be considered on its own merit, the Minnesota Legislature had a profound change of heart. Minnesota approved the proposed 19th Amendment that would end voting discrimination against women by a margin of 100 to 28 in the House and 49 to 7 in the Senate.

For our next stop, turn west toward the river and take a right on 7th Street South. Walk north two blocks and the next stop will be on the right side of the road: 310 7th St S

Stop 7: 310 7th St S
The Jenny Briggs House

This was the home of Jenny and Francis Briggs. Jenny was one of five Chairmen of our branch of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association, serving with Anna Gates, Edith Darrow Godfrey, Bessie Lewis and May Burnham, who you will meet next. Jenny’s husband Francis was a physician. This family wasn’t in town for too many years, but they were important years. They were here in 1920 when the 19th Amendment finally achieved Voting Rights for Women, and they were here for the world-changing event that went a long way to making the 19th Amendment possible - I’m talking about World War I.

Americans have forgotten just how important and life-changing World War One was to our ancestors. To those who lived through it, WWI was a defining moment of a generation, the biggest challenge our nation faced since the Civil War fifty years before. The leading families of each American community were expected to step up and lead their town’s war effort on the Home Front. And as we have seen so many times already, Woman Suffrage families were Moorhead’s community leaders, and they stepped up.

In this home, Dr. Francis Briggs served on the county draft board until he took a dose of his own prescription and became a Captain in the US Army. While her husband was away serving in an Army Hospital in New Jersey, Jenny volunteered for the most important Home Front organization of the war: the Red Cross. The Red Cross organized 20 million American volunteers to help them build wartime hospitals and stock those hospitals with everything they needed from bandages to nurses. The strength of the Red Cross was due its ability to employ the energy and enthusiasm of American women and by being one of the few organizations that offered leadership positions to women. Volunteers knit soldiers sweaters, socks, stocking caps, and bandages. Clay County organized at least 35 chapters of the Red Cross. Jenny Briggs and her fellow Suffrage Chairmen Edith Darrow Godfrey and Bessie Lewis were all members of the First Congregational Church’s Red Cross Auxiliary. Bessie Lewis’ daughter Flora was the president of the 200 member Red Cross branch at the Moorhead Normal School.

American women served in countless other ways. Moorhead Suffrage chairman Esther Russell was also chairman of the Women’s Committee of the Council of National Defense for Clay County and led the Food Administration’s efforts to help families preserve and conserve food at home. Anna Gates had two sons who saw heavy fighting in the war. Her son Dewey was decorated for bravery for rescuing a wounded soldier from No Man’s Land and was later wounded himself. And while our Suffragists may have turned their attention toward war work, they also shamed President Woodrow Wilson for fighting for democracy in Europe while ignoring democracy at home. In 1917, Mary Darrow Weible, cousin of Moorhead’s Edith Darrow Godfrey, joined fellow Suffragists to picket in front of the White House.

When the war was won, Americans looked back at the leading roles women played and the sacrifices they endured for their nation. When they asked for the vote, how could they be denied? The final passage of the 19th Amendment was the culmination of decades of work by Suffragists and the final victory was thanks to many reasons, but the fact that the amendment was sent out to the states six months after the guns fell silent and three weeks before the Treaty of Versailles was signed suggests World War I had something to do with convincing the average (male) voter that it was wrong to deny women the vote. And it wasn’t just Americans. Woman Suffragists in United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Russia, Austria, and Hungary all won their voting rights at the end of World War I.
Our next stop is the Moorhead Public Library at 118 5th St S. If you go directly across the street from the Briggs House to the brick house across 7th, you’ll see a stamp for Joseph V Godfrey in the sidewalk. The Library is two blocks west and two blocks north of here.

Stop 8: 118 5th St S
The Moorhead Public Library

Moorhead, Fargo and many other towns in our country owe the founding of their public library to their local Woman’s Club. Sarah Comstock’s 1901 presidential address to the Moorhead Woman’s Club called for the creation of a club library, but the members’ ambition soon grew to creating a town public library. Two years later, In 1903, Moorhead attorney George Perley wrote a letter to the club calling their attention to how industrialist Andrew Carnaegie, one of the richest people in history, had recently begun a program of donating money to build public libraries. The Moorhead Woman’s Club went to work. They got a grant from Carnegie for $12,000 to build the building. They got the city of Moorhead to agree to take on the added responsibility of operating a library. They raised money to buy the city lot to build the library - the original lot was where Regal’s appliance store is today on Main Avenue and 6th Street. And once the building was built, they filled it with books. The Moorhead Public Library opened to the public in 1906.

When the Woman’s Suffrage Amendment passed, Ethel McCubrey was a librarian here. She lived with her father, Grovenor McCubrey, who was the clerk of court for Clay County and would later become our state representative in St. Paul. Grovenor McCubrey was a member of the Minnesota Woman’s Suffrage Association and a member of the Men’s League for Woman Suffrage in Minnesota.

Our area did a good job of electing suffrage supporting politicians from both sides of the aisle. Our State Senator Frank H. Peterson, whose house you visited on this tour, was considered a Progressive Republican. The major rival party here at that time was the Nonpartisan League, which officially endorsed Woman’s Suffrage as part of their platform. Our State Representative Solomon P. Anderson of the NPL was a member of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association. His predesessor, the future U.S. Congressman Knud Wefald, was also a Suffrage supporter. Today, the wife of Knud’s grandson, Susan Wefald of Bismarck, is the co-chair of the North Dakota Woman’s Suffrage Centennial Committee.

The Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association lists two other local men as members. Both were Norwegian bachelor farmers - August Narveson and Emil Lambert. The 1916 Clay County Illustrated magazine described Lambert as “one of the progressive farmers of Moorhead township who has always been too busy to find a wife.” The state suffrage association has Lambert on a list of 11 people statewide who offered to distribute Suffrage literature.

The next stop is just a block to the west on the north end of a large new brick commercial building. 115 4th Street South, the current site of Third Drop Coffee.

Stop 9: 115 4th St S
Formerly Burhnam Boarding House

The current site of Third Drop Coffee used to be the Burnham Boarding House, home to Minnesota Suffrage Association Chairman Mae Burhnam and her mother Elsie. Mae likely would’ve been a toddler when her civil engineer father Ozro and her mother Elsie brought her to Moorhead in the early 1880s. Ozro’s brother Frank Burnham and his wife Hattie were prominent early residents of our town. Mae’s Aunt Hattie was a founding member of the Moorhead Woman’s Club and her Uncle Frank J. Burnham was a prominent attorney and the president of the First National Bank.

Mae’s mother Elsie had three children but only Mae survived. Then, when Mae was about 10 or 11, her father died. After Ozro’s death, to make ends meet, Elsie Burnham ran a boarding house.

Many American women, especially widowed or otherwise single women, were able to provide for their families by running a boarding house. Elsie Burnham would cook, clean, and do the laundry for her boarders. City directories indicate that there were perhaps four rooms - one for Elsie herself, one for her daughter Mae who worked as a grade school teacher, one for a longtime boarder named Lena Johnson, and the other rooms were usually men who worked as laborers and moved often. Most boarding houses provided each lodger with a bedroom and the house would also have common spaces like a kitchen, dining room and maybe a sitting room. After Elsie died, Mae took over her mother’s boarding house.

The Burnham Boarding House is long gone, but it is fitting that in its place is another family business that passed down through generations of women. What used to be Moxie Java was recently renamed Third Drop Coffee as a way to celebrate the third generation of women in the family to run this business. And if you look around this block you will see so many businesses owned in whole or in part by women - Riverzen Art Studio, Joni Salon and Spa, Rustica Eatery and Tavern, Prairie Fiber Arts, across the street you might see kids playing in the back of Inspire Innovation Lab, and just a couple doors down from Third Drop Coffee, a century after people like Mae Burnham helped women gain the right to vote, we have the local office of Amy Klobachar, one of Minnesota’s two women US Senators.

It’s a bit of a long trek to the next stop. Turn around and cross back to the east side of 8th Street. You’ll probably want to cross at the 8th and Main intersection, and then make your way to 204 9th St S.

Stop 10: 204 9th St S
The Marguerita Garrity House

Marguerita Garrity was one of the Chairmen of our branch of the Minnesota Woman Suffrage Association. She was born Marguerita Evans and grew up on a farm outside Ottumwa, Iowa. After graduating from her rural school, she studied Domestic Sciences first at Iowa State University in Ames and then Columbia University in New York City. While there, according to family memory, Marguerita marched for Woman’s Suffrage in Washington, D.C.

After graduating, “Rita” took a job teaching in Moorhead Public Schools. While dining at the Curran Boarding House she came to know a young attorney named James A. Garrity. On May 31, 1917, Marguerita and James were married back home in Iowa. The Garritys were young and ambitious but they had to try harder than most to rise through the ranks of Moorhead’s finest families - the reason for this is they were Catholic in a town where the majority of the population were Scandinavian Lutherans and the social elite had roots in Protestant New England. It’s a testament to how far we’ve come in the last 100 years that today, we find the idea of discrimination against Catholics to be absurd, but it was real back then. And the Garritys were successful. The family would eventually move to a big beautiful white house across the street from the Comstocks and two doors down from the Petersons on 8th Street, Marguerita’s husband would become Judge James Garrity, her son would also become Judge James Garrity.

We already mentioned that the leading families of each American community were expected to be leaders in the war effort, and it goes the other way around, too. If you wanted to be seen as a community leader, you should be leading the war effort. Marguerita was chosen to be the head of Clay County’s Hospital Supplies Committee of the Red Cross, an extremely important post. And her husband James was very busy with home front activities, leading the Knights of Columbus’ Liberty Loan drive and giving patriotic speeches at theaters, picnics, or wherever people might need a jolt of war fever.

Marguerita Evans Garrity served as Suffrage chairman at the same time as Anna Gates, Esther Russell and Ann Kossick. She likely struck up a friendship with fellow Catholic Ann Kossick, and soon they were family. In 1919, Anne Kossick married Marguerita’s brother and moved to the farm in Iowa. The 1920 census shows that two of Anne’s sisters, Helen and Clara Kossick, were living here in the Garrity home as boarders.

Anne Kossick Evans proves that Suffragists as individuals defy stereotypes. The Kossicks were a large German Catholic immigrant railroad family, and they were NOT Temperance advocates. Her brother Leo Kossick gained local fame as an amateur boxer and later ran pool halls, taverns, and bowling alleys. Her brother Alex was a bartender at the Blackhawk Café until he opened Kossick’s Liquors, and Anna’s Iowa farmer husband, Marguerita Garrity’s brother, was no Dry either. And while I’m not sure if Marguerita was as alcohol-friendly as her name implies, we know her husband liked liquor. As County Attorney, James Garrity was the most important figure in legally ending Clay County’s 22 year long experiment with Prohibition.

One final stop. If you’re facing the front door of the Garrity House, turn to your right and walk south down 9th Street. On the other side of the parking lot of the Townsite Center, which used to be the old Moorhead High School, you’ll see a big blue two-story house. We are going to a big yellow house just on the other side of that. You can follow the sidewalk around the block or you can take a shortcut through the parking lot to 421 9th St S.

Stop 11: 421 9th St S
The Sharp House

If any family could challenge the Comstocks for the title of Moorhead’s most respected founding family, it would be their good friends James and Philadelphia Sharp, who lived in this house. James Sharp, like Solomon Comstock, was also here for Moorhead’s rough, Wild West birth. He rose to become Justice of the Peace and the founder of our school system. That large building behind you that is now Sharp View Apartments used to be a school named for the Sharp family. James and Philadelphia Sharp’s children became prominent leaders of our town’s second generation. Their daughter Philadelphia Sharp Carpenter inherited her parents house, and in this house, in 1930, a meeting was held to establish a local chapter of the League of Women Voters.

The League of Women Voters is the direct descendant of America’s Woman’s Suffrage organizations. The League was born in 1920 because, after generations of struggle and organizing, the National Woman Suffrage Association had no reason for being anymore. They won the vote! So in their victory, they disbanded, and reformed as a new organization devoted to voter education they called the League of Women Voters. Just like before, local chapters formed throughout the country. The chapter of the League formed in this house in 1930 was not Moorhead’s first chapter - we had one right away in 1920. Our first chairman was Lucy Sheffield, a music teacher whose father was a railroad laborer. Other officers included Marie Thompson (a young daughter of a farming family who was a WWI Red Cross leader), Nora Dickerson (whose husband was the new president of Moorhead Normal School) and Edna Stadum (wife of a Glyndon banker).

Today, the League of Women Voters of the Red River Valley, headquartered in Fargo-Moorhead, serves voters on both sides of the river. This nonpartisan group holds local candidate debates, they have a lunch-time lecture series where polacy leaders or scholars talk about important issues of the day, and they encourage people to vote and be active participants in our democracy. Membership is open to both women and men, and the work of the League of Women Voters of the Red River Valley benefits every one of us in the community. If this sounds like something you like, check them out.

Well, that’s our last stop. The Comstock House where we began this walk is just a block ahead and a block to the right. I’d like to thank you for coming along on this walk to remember some people who worked to wake up our nation to the self-evident truth that all of us are created equal. Don’t take for granted what they fought so hard to give us…your country needs active and informed citizens. You have a duty, and a right, to Vote.

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Archives

Visit Us

Resources

Accessibility

Connect

How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Book by Clint Smith, published June 1, 2021
Book review by Emily Kulzer, HCSCC Director of Museum Operations