Farmer William Thornton Montgomery had more land than any other African American in Dakota Territory. From about 1881-1900, he owned 1,020 acres two miles north of Christine, ND (about 20 miles south of Fargo) plus more land in Cass County and Manitoba. Local newspapers describe him as “a most worthy man,” and “the greatest Colored farmer of the Northwest.” 
 
W. T. Montgomery had a fascinating life. He was well educated (against the law) as an enslaved child. He served in the US Navy in the Civil War. His family bought the plantation where they were once enslaved, and for a time they were among the wealthiest merchant-planters in Mississippi. William’s appointments as a postmaster and a constable in 1867 make him likely the first African American to hold public office in Mississippi. He moved to Dakota Territory in 1881 because he was pessimistic about the prospects of African Americans receiving fair treatment in the South.  

William Thornton Montgomery spent most of his fascinating life in Utopian Communities. 

Robert Owen’s Worker’s Utopia
Robert Owen was a wealthy British factory owner who became an early philosopher of Utopian Socialism. He turned his bleak Scottish Industrial Revolution textile factory into a utopia for his workers. He shortened the work day to 10 hours and gave them health care, sick pay, and health insurance. He abolished child labor and put the children in school instead. In the 1820s he went to America to spread his philosophical ideas and set up new utopian communities. All of his utopias failed, but his ideas aged well.   

Joseph Davis’ Utopian Plantation
In 1825, Joseph Davis met Robert Owen and tried to adapt his utopian ideas to the Mississippi plantation system. The 345 men, women and children on his unique plantation in 1860 had better living conditions than most enslaved people in the South, but they were still enslaved. They had better food and clothing rations, larger homes, and overseers could not punish anyone unless they were convicted by their peers in the Hall of Justice. People were encouraged to learn skilled trades to make extra money and to learn to read and write, which was illegal in the South. This is where W.T. Montgomery grew up. 
 
Jefferson Davis & the Civil War
Joseph Davis’ land also included the plantation of his younger brother Jefferson Davis. When the Civil War broke out, Jefferson Davis became president of the Confederate States of America. The Davis “utopia” ended when the US Navy arrived in 1862 and all the enslaved “members” chose freedom. Several men including W.T. Montgomery joined the US military to fight the Confederacy. For the rest of the war, the US government took pleasure in using Jefferson Davis’ plantation as a place for the Freedmen’s Bureau to experiment with ways of easing formerly enslaved people into freedom and a market economy.    
 
The Association of Montgomery & Sons 
Benjamin Montgomery, William’s father, was the enslaved operator of the Davis plantations. He was highly educated against Mississippi laws, a mechanical and business genius, and charismatic. Before the war, a general store he opened on the plantation made him wealthy. As a freed man at the end of the war, he purchased the plantation from Joseph Davis. Montgomery shared Davis’ utopian philosophy, and he created a community of free African American sharecroppers he called the Association. For a time, the Montgomerys were among the wealthiest merchant-planters in the South, but the community was eventually undone by a combination of local natural disasters, the crash of the cotton industry, and a white court awarding Jefferson Davis much of the land under questionable reasoning. The demise of the Montgomery & Sons Association convinced W.T. Montgomery to move to Dakota Territory in 1881.   
 
Isaiah Montgomery’s Mound Bayou
W.T. Montgomery liked Dakota Territory and tried to convince his family and other former members of the Association to move here. His younger brother Isaiah, however, decided to start a new utopian community of African American landowners and businesses in Mississippi called Mound Bayou. In the last decade of his life, W.T. Montgomery decided to join the colony, working as a director of the Bank of Mound Bayou and co-founder of the Mound Bayou Loan and Investment Co. 

(Text from Stories of Local Black History an HCSCC produced exhibit) 

We are excited to announce a series of spring History Harvests in the communities of Barnesville, Hawley, Ulen, and Moorhead. The HCSCC is hoping to interview people about built places in Clay County that have meaning to them. Anyone who has a story or a memory is invited to stop in and share, first-come, first-served. These buildings can still be standing or may be long gone. The interviews will be recorded and stored in the Clay County Archives. The stories about the places that result from the interviews will be shared with the public through the North Star Story Map (see https://northstarstorymap.org/).

North Star Story Map is a collaboration between the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Minnesota, Mill City Museum, and the Minnesota Historical Society. This collaboration is made possible by the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund through the vote of Minnesotans on Nov 4, 2008.
 
The scheduled gatherings include:
Tues. March 4, 1-4pm at the Barnesville Public Library, 104 Front Street N.
Wed. March 19, 1-4pm at the Garrick Theatre in Hawley, 509 Front Street.
Wed. April 2, 1-4pm Ulen Senior Center, 60 Front Street E.
Wed. April 23, 1-4pm Moorhead Public Library, 118 5th St. S.
 
Light refreshments will be served. Please feel free to bring along photographs and historical objects or items pertaining to Clay County history to be photographed. For more information email [email protected] or call Maureen at 218-299-5511, Ext 6732.

One issue that some museums in Minnesota face in their historical collections is abandoned loans. These are objects that a patron has loaned to the museum for display, research, or another purpose, but for whatever reason, the lender did not respond to attempts by the museum to arrange for the items to be returned. This can be a problem for museums because these items take up space in the museum’s storage and require resources to care for their preservation, but the museum does not hold clear title to the objects and so cannot remove the object from its collection and possession if the object is deemed to no longer fit the museum’s collecting objectives. When the Clay County Historical Society opened its first museum in 1936 in the basement of McLean Hall at the Moorhead State Teachers College, many objects were given or donated to the museum, but many more were loaned for the first educational displays of Clay County history. The terms of these loans were often informal, with the lender allowing the museum to use the objects for as long as it needed to, and the museum giving license to the lenders to stop by to pick up the objects whenever they would like. Over the years, many items were returned, but many still remain in the museum’s collection. HCSCC no longer accepts loans of objects without a defined end date.

In 2004, the state’s museum community achieved the goal of having legislation passed with a path for museums to follow to acquire clear ownership of these types of objects in their collections, called the Minnesota Museum Property Act. The law outlines clear steps that the museum must take and document in order to be able to declare ownership of abandoned pieces in their collection. The museum must first attempt to notify the lender of the abandoned property by certified mail one final time at their last known address. If the lender or their heir does not come forward within the time allotted after the delivery of the mail notification, the museum must publish notice in a local publication for a specified period of time. If the lender or an heir does not contact the museum within the designated time frame after the public notice, the museum may claim ownership of the loaned objects. The collections staff at the HCSCC has begun the process of identifying objects and collections that were loaned in order to begin the process of acquiring clear title to them. It will be a time-consuming project and will incur some costs, but it is a necessary task for responsible stewardship of the society’s collection of artifacts that document the county’s history.

​I was at a long table full of friends at a regular Friday after work get together. John Trelstad mentioned that he just ran across the lyrics to the first song he ever wrote. In 1975, John was asked to write a song about a local double murder that took place in 1873. Some guy named Patrick Sullivan did it, he said. I darn near dropped by glass of “Friday after work juice.” “Patrick Sullivan?” I exclaimed. “The guy who killed Jerry Brennan and Whats-His-Name Fallon?” I was shocked. There is actually a song about this piece of Wild West Moorhead history?

Here’s what happened 150 years ago. Patrick Sullivan was a worker on the Northern Pacific Railway who, sources say, was involved in leading other workers in a strike. Employers frown upon that kind of behavior, so Pat was fired. In the early morning hours of June 29, 1873, sometime between 1 and 4 am, an already drunk Pat walked into John Hanson’s saloon, and who did he see? NPRR section bosses Andrew Fallon and Jerry Brennan. Pat ordered a drink and told the two men that he dropped his watch. Fallon leaned down to look for it. Suddenly Sullivan sliced Fallon’s abdomen open with a knife and stabbed Brennan twice in the bowels. Patrick Sullivan then calmly left the saloon. His victims took hours to die.

John Hanson quickly called for Sheriff Jim Blanchard. Before Blanchard could get a posse together to apprehend Sullivan, though, the slayer walked back into the saloon, took a seat, and turned himself in. The jury found Sullivan insane and sentenced him to the asylum in St. Peter. After a couple years, he was deemed sane again, retried for the murders, and sent to prison in Stillwater. He was in Stillwater Penitentiary either (according to local historian Roy Johnson’s 1950 article) for the rest of his life, or (according to Sheriff Blanchard’s memoir) for a couple of years until he escaped and moved to Ireland.

One hundred and two years later, Fargo-Moorhead was gearing up for their towns’ shared centennial celebration (the centennial for these towns founded in 1871 was oddly held in 1975). The festivities culminated in a play about local history that ran for 5 nights on an outdoor stage at MSUM’s Nemzek Field. John Trelstad, a 22-year-old musician, was asked to write a song about Moorhead’s Wild West days and perform it in that play. He wasn’t a songwriter, but he read the story and put words to music. It was the first song he ever wrote. The second he wrote was about the Flood of 2009, and it raised $4000 for the Salvation Army.    
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Just shy of a half century later, John plays guitar and mandolin for the band Tuckered Out, alongside his brother Lynn Trelstad and bassist Ryan Haug. Tuckered Out has a regular gig at the Troll Lounge on the 4th Thursday of every month. Go see them!