War, Flu, & Fear
World War I and Clay County
Heritage Hall, through January 2020

In April, 1917, Americans were thrust into the middle of a brutal global war, only months after reelecting a president who campaigned on isolationism. Few in the county supported the war, but they served when they were called. The following year, 1918, brought perhaps the bloodiest months in our history. Then armistice, peace, and a global flu pandemic striking on an unseen scale. Residents in the Red River Valley responded with courage and patriotic sacrifice, fear and paranoia, activism and political repression.

War, Flu, and Fear gathers these stories to explore life in Clay County and the Red River Valley only 100 years ago, on the local front at the dawn of cultural modernism and the American century.

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