Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Official Newspaper of Eddy County since 1883
Sorted by date Results 26 - 50 of 339
There seems to be a theme running in Archival Anecdotes as of late. Over the past few weeks I have shared insights into the lives and contributions of folks who helped charter the Eddy County Museum. It turns out that some of those early members made their contributions in pairs, like Alice and Joe Rindt. If I were to go back to 1966 in the meeting minutes, I imagine we could learn a lot about the dynamics the couple contributed to the board, but that is far more archiving than I'm able to do at...
History is what we make it Dorothy Payne Beardsley (1894-1985) lived to be 90 years old and experienced nearly a century of rapid cultural change in her lifetime. She was involved with the Minerva Club and Pioneer Daughters, and became one of the founding members of the Eddy County Museum. Her obituary, as printed in the New Rockford Transcript, highlights her educational achievements as a 1913 New Rockford High graduate and a scholar at Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio. A look through...
Legacy is a word that conjures images of grandeur. It has always felt like a fancy word, with wide expanses and a sprinkling of crown-jewels. While many people talk about creating a legacy to leave behind for future generations, Merriam-Webster offers a more neutral notion of the term, "a thing transmitted by or received from an ancestor, predecessor or from the past." Eddy County Museum fits that definition, as it was left for us by long-lived community members in the 1960s. They knew the...
I am counting the days until the snow piles outside the museum melt and allow access to any of the buildings, and the artifacts within. Don't get me wrong, I love the photographs and stories I've been working with all winter, but I get especially excited to document and display artifacts. All the clues can come together to provide us with incredible insight. Last spring I had a particularly delightful time extracting wedding dresses and suits from the various closets. It's easy to understand...
There are many elements involved in keeping a museum. When I first began offering my archival skills to the Eddy County Museum, my primary task was to document each artifact and enter it into a spreadsheet database. With more than 3,000 artifacts on display, it was a daunting task. However it had been attempted before, in a notebook, years before computers and digital spreadsheets were accessible. Elvera Johnson had begun lists of items that resided in the schoolhouse. If you recall, the...
"It is not so much our friends' help that helps us, as the confidence of their help." – Epicurus, Greek Philosopher, 300 B.C. If you have been following Archival Anecdotes this month, then you can now consider yourself adequately schooled on the role women's clubs had in our rural communities. You also gained an understanding of the national trends that were driving some of the club activities both at home and afar. As you travel across the country, especially in small communities, be on the l...
In anticipation of the warmer days ahead, it seems as though there is no better time to introduce the Original Garden Club and the contents of their 1971 Scrapbook. The photographs in the scrapbook are exactly what you would expect from a group of botanical enthusiasts; flowers, flower arrangements, flower arrangements on exhibit, and club members preparing flower shows. To be honest, reproducing most of these photos in the newspaper just wouldn't do them justice. This collection is best to be v...
In honor of National Women's History Month, we've been exploring the role that women's clubs had in creating our local histories. This would be a difficult task for our little museum, however one certain type of artifact made history all the more accessible - the scrapbook. For those who might not be familiar, scrapbooks are compositionally arranged pages that consist of paper cutouts, print media and embellishments. They appeared about the same time print media began to flourish in the late...
March is a month of change. There's even that old saying, "In like a lion and out like lamb," that somehow provides comfort in uncertainty. The Calendar of Cheer has an interesting passage for us this month that reads, "A place in the ranks awaits you, Each man [and woman] has some part to play. The past and future are nothing in the face of the stern today." The calendar left these words uncredited, but thanks to the internet in 2023, I was able to uncover the origin of the poem. "Now" was...
You might think that it wasn’t acceptable for mothers of the 19th century to work for a wage outside of the home. However, it would be more appropriate to say that it did not make economic sense for her to do so. The value of her work at home was too great. It is interesting to note that it was the following generation (those born around 1900), who began applying modern skill sets to community enhancement. For the Pioneer Daughters in 1961, members document their family histories. They conducted interviews, documented narratives, c...
The Homestead Act of 1862 opened settlement opportunities throughout the Dakota Territory, thus giving the Scandinavian populations an opportunity to escape crop shortages and create new opportunities. It is estimated that between 1865 and 1918, 1.3 million Swedes and 800,000 Norwegians immigrated to America. Some of those immigrants made it to Eddy County. It wasn't uncommon for young women to travel and immigrate on their own, nor was it uncommon for them to work to fund their trip. In 1894,...
In recent weeks, I've been writing about the origins of the Eddy County Museum, and by extension the Pioneer Daughters Club. I am aware however, that there is another event that I have failed to include- the county's Diamond Jubilee in 1958. I learned about this event a couple years ago while I was digitizing photos. If there ever was a photographically documented event in Eddy County's history, the Diamond Jubilee is it. Through these photos we can clearly see the celebration of history...
At 20 years of age, Sveinung A. Olsness left his home in Vinyo Telem, Norway and traveled by steam and sail to New York, ultimately making it to North Dakota by rail in 1886. When Olsness began farming, wheat sold for 64 cents a bushel in New Rockford. At that time, farming was done by oxen, horse and mule. Breaking was done by walking plows, and the land was then disced and seeded with a broadcast. When harvest time came, it was done with a cradle, a scythe with wooden tines which kept the...
It has been nearly 60 years since the Eddy County Museum held its first meeting and established a board of directors. The founding board was led by chairman Alice Rindt and secretary-treasurer Addie Leske. Lenora Neuharth served on the museum board and as president of the Minerva Club. Edyth Piper was also involved in the Minerva Club in addition to the museum, and was president of the Pioneer Daughters. Elsie Dunham, Joyce Mattson, Ann Owens, Edgar Mattson, Joe Rindt, Edwin Horning, and Horton...
In recent weeks, I've been sharing about the collaborative efforts that founded the museum. The Pioneer Daughters were just one of the many organizations involved. After all, they were a local chapter with historic interests. The first objective of the organizations included recording pioneer family histories. The second was to construct a shelf to display historic items in a public setting. As ideas developed and were shared, the project grew into something much bigger. The ideas grew so big...
When the Pioneer Daughters first organized in 1961, they set out to document their family histories. This granted future generations an incredible window into the past. You too can take a look through this window! It is open to the public, through the Eddy County Museum’s website, at eddycounty.catalogaccess.com. Currently, there are 39 “Pioneer Histories” ready and waiting to show you a piece of the past. For now, I will share a few excerpts. I only ask that you ponder this: here we are, in 2023, reading the histories that were written 60 ye...
The history of the Pioneer Daughters extend back to 1929 when J.M. Diving delivered a speech in Dickenson titled "The Pioneer Mother of N. Dak." The Pioneer Daughters were a special branch of the North Dakota Federation of Women's Clubs. To be eligible to join, a woman needed to be the descendant of a pioneer family who settled in the area prior to its statehood. The primary goal of the organization was "to honor the memory of pioneer mothers of this state and to keep alive its heritage."...
Welcome to a newly relaunched edition of Archival Anecdotes! This exclusive feature first came to be during the 2020 pandemic and continued to the end of 2021. In past editions of Archival Anecdotes, I took readers back to the beginnings of Eddy County- some 140+ years ago. Readers learned about the commercial development that came to define Eddy County, as well as some of the modern inventions that undoubtedly influenced life on the prairie. We took a look at some of the fashion and styles of...
Life is complicated, I think most of us can agree on that. So when I came across this unique card for a Happy New Year, I knew I wanted to share. It features several geese in the barnyard, unsuspecting of the menacing fox nearby. On the back, it includes a poem by Fredrick Langridge that reads, "The peaceful geese enjoy a drink Without the slightest thought of fear And yet there's ample cause, I think Their sly old foe, the fox, is near. Before a cackle they can say, He pounces down, in haste...
Many times, I have thought about the inner lives of people who settled Eddy County. Did they curse the cold? Did they miss the friends and family they left behind? Did they burn a candle late into the night, or go to bed early, buried deep under the covers? Did they yearn for company, or perhaps sought out solace? We can never truly answer such questions, but there are artifacts within the museum that provide insight. Anton Youngberg traveled from Sweden to America in 1900. When he arrived at...
The snow is on the ground. It happens almost every year. And yet, so many of us can still be left in awe of the accumulations. In the early days, there seemed to be no shortage of excitement around a significant snowfall. This article highlights a few of the events that residents recorded through photographs. Please note- this is by no means an exhaustive history of regional blizzards, just some insight regarding the artifacts left behind. The earliest photographic accounts include the...
So many of the Christmas traditions we embrace today took root in the British culture of the Victorian Era. It was a time for rapid commercial development and industrial growth. There were great advancements in transportation, and the first mail order catalog made its debut. We start by going back 203 years to 1818, when "Silent Night" was first heard by villagers attending Christmas Eve mass in St. Nicholas Church in Oberndorf, Austria. It has endured to become one of the most appreciated...
I'd like to introduce you to an antiquated hairstyle that still offers loads of volume. The pompadour- you might have heard of it before. The pompadour was a trend for men in the 1950s, and for Madam Pompadour, who became the namesake of the 'do. But the pompadour I am writing about is as Edwardian as they come, set firmly from the 1890s until 1920. It was a time for progress in many arenas: transportation, communication, medicine, education and more. Women's fashion flourished with billowing bl...
During the holiday season, it is quite possible that you will find yourself dining upon fine china or other heirloom porcelain. If you do, then you have a great opportunity to take a look back in history. First a little clarification on terminology. In American English, we often use the word china to refer to high-quality dishes. However, for historians and collectors, fine china has specific thin texture resulting from white kaolin clay and was primarily produced in China. Porcelain has a sim...
Regular readers of Archival Anecdotes might recognize the name that belonged to an Eddy County pioneer, Elsie Kerr. Many of her items have been featured in this series - from cookie jars and flour-sack bloomers, to postcards and more. Kerr had vast collections and connections, with which she made significant contributions to the Eddy County Museum. Her donations include various dolls, clothing items, household items, fiber art implements, handwritten correspondences, and a number of early...
