Emily Royston, Audiovisual Collections Intern

The North Dakota State Archives houses a large collection of film and magnetic tape in a variety of formats that it continues to archive, preserve, and digitize for public use. From home videos to television news footage to oral histories to professional and educational films, the Archives stores hours upon hours of material.

Since I was new to the audiovisual field, spending 12 weeks this past summer working with different formats, equipment, and software was enlightening and opened new avenues of interest for a career in this area. My training included processing and describing AV collections, using video editing and digitization software, handling and inspecting film and analog tapes, and engaging in preservation practices. Much of my work centered on two large collections: the WDAZ-TV Collection, consisting of approximately 2,200 analog tapes, and the Matthew Werven and Diana (Yeado) Oral History Collection, which includes over 700 interviews of North Dakota residents.

For WDAZ, one of ten North Dakota TV stations in our collection, it was my job to input the data from the tapes’ respective shot sheets—such as news stories, date of broadcasts, names of reporters—into our collections management software to make the clips discoverable. I also processed and digitized part of the Werven collection, using audio cassette decks and the software Audacity to create audio files.

Outside of these collections, I also had the opportunity to digitize other formats such as open-reel audio tapes, video cassettes, and film. Working with film was one of my favorite parts of the internship. I learned how to inspect films for patron requests and carry out preservation practices such as adding a protective leader to the heads and tails of film, rehousing films in ventilated archival cans to prevent off-gas build up, and removing adhesive and other residue using film cleaner. I can’t emphasize enough just how much fun I had working with these materials during the summer. I was so fortunate, particularly as someone from outside of the state (and the country!) to have been able to work with such a supportive and hospitable group of people.

Shelby Kriewald, Reference Intern

During my three-month internship at the State Archives last summer, I was assigned a variety of duties. When patrons visited our reading room, I commonly assisted them in using our microfilm scanners, atlases, or county history books. I also helped patrons navigate our website’s indexes and genealogical resources.

When I wasn’t helping patrons in person, I worked on a number of requests from those who reached out via phone or email. This included locating and sending out marriage records, biographies, naturalization records, obituaries, or other records. Additional projects I worked on at the reference desk included digitizing photos to put on our website, using archival software to find return locations for collections, transcribing oral history interviews, putting statistics into our database, and writing articles for "Dakota Datebook."

"Dakota Datebook" is a radio series broadcast by Prairie Public in partnership with the State Historical Society of North Dakota and other local organizations. This was one of my favorite projects to be involved in because it gave me the opportunity to do my own research and writing on history topics related to North Dakota. In doing my research for these articles, I typically looked through old newspaper articles using online resources like Advantage Archives or Chronicling America to find inspiration for stories. I also found sites like Ancestry.com very useful in providing census and biographical information related to the topics I was working on. In some cases, I even reached out to archives and institutions out of the state to locate obituaries and information needed for my writing. Several of my stories have aired on the radio and exist on Prairie Public’s website.

My internship with the State Archives was a very valuable learning experience. Not only did it enrich my knowledge of the region and its people, but it gave me the opportunity to learn about the daily operations of an archives firsthand. As someone who is interested in pursuing a career in archival science and special collections, this internship reinforced my career goals in ways that my undergrad education hadn’t ever before.

Clovis artifacts represent the earliest material evidence of human occupation in North Dakota. The Clovis tradition appeared on the Great Plains of North America about 12,000 to 13,500 years ago (Huckell 2014). The presence of unifacially or bifacially fluted stone spear points at an archaeological site is the primary distinctive marker of Clovis technology. However, not all Clovis sites contain fluted stone projectile points.

Casts of Clovis points from the Archaeology and Historic Preservation Education Collections. Clovis points are thin, fluted projectile points characterized by concave longitudinal shallow grooves that may have helped the points be inserted into spear shafts.

Various site types are associated with the Clovis tradition, including cache sites, encampments, quarry sites, and kill or butchering sites. Clovis artifacts found in caches more likely contain artifacts manufactured at quarry sites, then transported and placed into temporary storage. Caching behavior may indicate that individuals planned to set aside or hide artifacts for later use. Clovis sites are found all over North America and Central America, with caches often consisting of bifaces, projectile points, blades, flakes, and cores. One of the first caches discovered was named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the ancient culture’s distinctive spear points were found together with mammoth bones.

In North Dakota, the Clovis artifacts were recovered from the Beach Cache site near the town of Beach in the western part of the state. About 103 artifacts (from a total of 135) were recovered from a dozen cache pits between 1970 and 1975, and most pits contained 8 to 10 stone tools. Some of the artifacts came from a disturbed plow zone. These blanks (partially worked/unfinished tools) were formed for easier transportation and could be made into a variety of stone tools. The Beach Cache site did not have Clovis points. It was dominated by bifaces. More than half of the Beach cached bifaces (58) were made of White River Group (WRG) silicates found at Sentinel Butte. Other bifaces were made from black chalcedony (12), quartzite (12), Rainy Buttes silicified wood (8), porcellanite (3), chert (4), and petrified wood (3) (Kilby and Huckell 2013; Huckell 2014). The sources of stone materials used in making the Beach Cache artifacts may indicate the movements of the Clovis hunter-gatherers. Although the Beach Cache lacks diagnostic Clovis projectile points, it is identified as Clovis based upon the presence of distinctive lithic technological attributes and radiocarbon dates (Kilby and Huckell 2013).

Clovis Beach Cache artifacts on exhibit in the State Museum’s Innovation Gallery: Early Peoples. SHSND 2007.75.1, .2, .3, .5, .17, .18, .20, .22, .27, .28, .30, .32, .38, and .41.

The Clovis hunter-gatherers were constantly on the move, following migrating game. They hunted mammoths (extinct elephantids), mastodons, Bison antiquus, and other smaller animals. “Consideration of the kinds of caches, their geographic distribution, and the source locations for some of the stone tools present in the caches can provide insights into the patterns of migration of Clovis groups more than 12,000 years ago and may, in turn, shed light on the geographic origins of Clovis technology” (Schroedl 2021: 121). More information on the Clovis Beach Cache artifacts and early peoples of North Dakota is available in “Traces: Early Peoples of North Dakota,” by Barbara Handy-Marchello and the late Archaeology and Historic Preservation Department Director Fern E. Swenson. The book, published in 2018, is available for purchase at the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum store in Bismarck.

The small group of Clovis people that camped at the Beach Cache site may have come from the south and west, traveling from what is today eastern Wyoming via western South Dakota. Traces: Early Peoples of North Dakota, 2018

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References

Kilby, J. David, and Bruce B. Huckell. 2013. “Clovis Caches: Current Perspectives and Future Directions.”
In Paleoamerican Odyssey, edited by Kelly E. Graf, Caroline V. Ketron, and Michael R. Waters, 257–72. College Station: Texas A&M University Press.

Handy-Marchello, Barbara, and Fern E. Swenson. 2018. Traces: Early Peoples of North Dakota. Bismarck:
State Historical Society of North Dakota.

Huckell, Bruce B. 2014. “But How Do We Know If It’s Clovis? An Examination of Clovis Overshot Flaking
of Bifaces and a North Dakota Cache.” In Clovis Caches, Recent Discoveries and New Research, edited by Bruce B. Huckell and J. David Kilby, 133–52. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.

Schroedl, Alan R. 2021. “The Geographic Origin of Clovis Technology: Insights from Clovis Biface Caches.” Plains Anthropologist 66, no. 258: 120-48.

The State Historical Society of North Dakota’s Audience Engagement & Museum Department has accepted several interesting donations to its collections over the past few months. Let me take you on an unintentionally all-dance and music tour of these.

For starters, we had a sudden run of offers, which included square dancing items. By “sudden run,” I mean two donations. Which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.

The first donation was a collection of items from the Belles ‘N Beaux square dance club.

Belles ‘N Beaux square dance club of Burleigh-Morton counties was formed in 1959 and is still in operation. Several hand-painted items were accepted. These include a wooden wall hanging by E. Roswick, a banner of the Belles ‘N Beaux square dance club and a felt hanging waste bin from 1978.

Delightful artifacts related to the square dancing tradition of Belles ‘N Beaux. I personally aspire to the energy of the dancers in the image above. SHSND 2022.00035.00001-.00003

The second donation from the wonderful world of North Dakota square dancing was a Squarenaders tapestry from the community of Shields. The donor’s mother, Alice Ternes, was one of the original Squarenaders when the club started in the 1960s. She recalls that the Catholic priest from St. Gabriel’s parish started a square dance club with and for the people of Shields, as there wasn't any type of entertainment in town at the time.

Alice and her husband, Aloys, scheduled their farm work to allow them to square dance as often as possible. She remembers how some club members went to friends’ houses (usually neighboring farmers), strongly encouraging them to join and learn the dance. Initially hesitant, many neighbors were surprised when they were able to learn the steps and really enjoyed the activity.

Unfortunately, the Shields dance hall where the Squarenaders hosted their events burned down in 2002. But Alice still recollects that the smooth wood floors in the hall, where this banner below also likely hung, were perfect for dancing.

This large banner likely hung in the Shields dance hall, overlooking the whirling Squarenaders. Note the neat 3D elements, like the raised lace. SHSND PA-2022.094

To help fill out our collection, the State Museum is now looking for donations of square dance dresses, skirts, and suits worn by people who kicked it up over the years with any of North Dakota’s square dance clubs.

Speaking of musically related items, the final recent acquisitions I’ll tell you about are a Mandan High School Band cape and a Mandan Elks Band jacket. The cape and jacket belonged to the donor’s aunt Evelyn Stastny, who graduated from Mandan High School in 1949. In addition to playing clarinet in the Mandan High School Band, she was also in the Mandan Elks Band. She joined because it was a bit of a family affair—her father, Edward Stastny, was also a member of the Elks band.

Evelyn Stastny’s uniforms from her days playing clarinet with both the Mandan Elks Band, left, and the Mandan High School Band. SHSND PA-2022.080

If you are interested in donating objects to the agency’s museum collection, please get in touch. You can fill out a donation questionnaire at this link: Potential Acquisition Donor Questionnaire - State Historical Society of North Dakota. We can’t wait to hear from you!

Working with archives collections, that is, with books, papers, photos, and other two-dimensional records, is a gift unto itself. These are the actual documents interacted with by people of the past and are a part of our history! We learn cool facts as we process and use these collections. We also often see items of interest. Whether that means uncovering a surprising historical event or discovering something unexpected, our memorable finds fuel conversations and entertain us. However, these finds also provide us with a more personal insight into the history we are working with and the people who used these records.

Below you’ll find some unforgettable items our staff has come upon over the years while working in archives and libraries.

Keeping Track(s)

The most memorable thing I have found was in the Great Northern Railway Company, Minot Division, Engineering Department Records (MSS 10104). The collection consists of field notebooks, which I rehoused. During this process, I discovered what looked like a piece of railroad track being used as a spacer to keep notebooks upright in a box. I worked with this collection prior to being hired on full-time, so I also consider this item a neat memory of my days as a volunteer.

—Matt Ely, Photo Archivist

Hidden Behind the Frame

The most memorable finds in collections for me have been risqué photos. I have happened upon these several times, hidden behind framed photos or just loose among papers. I wonder about the circumstances that led to these materials being left in a collection donated to a public institution. Whether to keep these items as part of the collection sparks lively debate among our staff, harking back to our ethics lessons in school; that is a topic for another blog post.

—Emily Kubischta, Manuscript Archivist

A Personalized Stamp

Personal stamp of Joseph E. Kenney. SHSND SA 11371-00018

One find that stands out for me is an example of a personal stamp used by Joseph Edwin Kenney, a soldier in the 4th Minnesota Infantry Regiment during the Civil War. The impression, as shown in this image, is part of the Kenney Family Papers (MSS 11371) at the State Archives. The stamp itself is not part of the collection. I have worked with manuscripts of Civil War soldiers for years as part of my academic research, and I have never encountered something of this nature. Possible uses for the stamp include marking his clothing, equipment, and personal items. Joseph gave his life in defense of the Union during the Vicksburg campaign in May 1863.

—Daniel Sauerwein, Reference Specialist

Empty Drug Sampling Containers in a Case File

We received some urine sample collection holders from a state agency as part of a human resources termination case. The State Archives was not supposed to receive the containers, and they were returned for proper disposal. One wonders why the containers were kept once the proceedings were over. Thankfully, they were empty!

—Larissa Harrison, State Government Archivist

A North Dakota Connection to a Film Set in Africa

This still frame from Arch Oboler's unfinished travel film "Alice in Africa" depicts a Masaai tribesman in British Kenya. Red editing marks are visible throughout the footage.

The most memorable item I have discovered at the State Archives is an unfinished, unreleased film entitled “Alice in Africa” (MSS 10782, Bill Snyder Films Collection) produced and directed by Arch Oboler. North Dakota filmmaker Bill Snyder worked for Oboler in Africa during the late 1940s, which is how the film made its way from the continent to North Dakota. “Alice in Africa” centers on a white American woman (played by Oboler’s wife, Eleanor Oboler) who travels through Kenya, Uganda, and the Congo. While the film, which depicts activities and ceremonies of the Maasai, Kamba, and Tutsi tribes, does portray East Africa and its peoples from a white, colonial perspective, it is nonetheless a visually stunning work and an important piece of motion picture history. It represents an early example of a Kodachrome color reversal film of East Africa shot by Westerners.

—Anne Loos, Audiovisual Archivist

Literal Fingerprints

It’s hard to pin down just one memorable find. However, I would be remiss if I did not mention a recent surprise. While researching a collection, I discovered folders full of copies of fingerprints! Not a lot of paperwork accompanied them, but it was cool to see some old-school sleuthing kept in our Archives.

—Sarah Walker, Head of Reference Services

Funky Bookplates

Some of the most memorable things I have found come from my time processing new book acquisitions at a previous job in the Department of Special Collections at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries. My favorite part was checking to see if the book had a bookplate. A bookplate is a decorative label inside the front cover of a book showing who owns it. While printing your name would suffice, why wouldn’t you choose to design a bookplate that reflects your unique personal style and interests? Above is one of my favorites. I hope to find more weird and wonderful bookplates here at the State Archives.

—Ashley Thronson, Reference Specialist

Clippings and Trim

This is the reason why archivists need up-to-date tetanus shots! I keep this box of paperclips (usually of the sharp or questionable variety) beside my desk and, as you can see, use it regularly to collect the many varied things used as fasteners I find while going through collections.

—Megan Steele, Local Government Records Archivist

Admittedly, the best part of my job is the opportunity to organize and create exhibitions. I love the creative forces involved in producing an exhibition—discovering new stories, collaborating on storylines, and working with our team to devise original ways to interpret exhibition themes. Then there is the “stuff” of exhibits, the wonderful objects from which the stories spring. I have long enjoyed working with objects and exploring the “chatter” and relationships that exist between them. It is also deeply gratifying to see how gallery visitors respond to and move through an exhibition. Once you open the gallery doors, exhibitions take on a life of their own.

The care and maintenance of an exhibition’s life cycle is also an important component of my job. We often revisit an installation, adjusting elements that need additional attention. This may include switching out an interpretive panel that is problematic or simply correcting a typo. It can mean adjusting an audiovisual component, refocusing a light, replacing a video monitor that is acting up, or even something as simple as lubricating a squeaky hinge.

The exhibition’s life can also entail adding new components. At the State Museum in Bismarck, just one of about a dozen of our exhibition areas across the state, we are currently working on an upgrade to the Industry & Energy section of the North Dakota story in the Inspiration Gallery: Yesterday and Today.

Two display fixtures donated by Continental Resources will be used to expand the narrative about the role of core samples within the petroleum industry. This involves reconceptualizing the exhibition space as well as developing new interpretive text and selecting accompanying photographs. Fortunately, we were able to draw from a series of photographs of the Williston Basin produced by Susan Tadewald for the State Historical Society of North Dakota Foundation.

Concept drawing for the core sample display at the North Dakota Heritage Center & State Museum.

Pump operation near Williston, 2012. Photo by Susan Tadewald

The addition to the energy display also allows us to repurpose an existing interactive station and expand the current footprint of the display.

This project piqued my interest as it ties into my background. My late father was a geophysicist who worked in the petroleum industry and part of his job entailed interpreting seismic records and core samples. Indeed, core samples even served as decorative objects around my childhood homes. Later in my professional life, I encountered a custom-made dining table with a topographic map etched into its glass surface, supported on an undulating pedestal base made of core samples.

Maintenance issues relating to the physical structure of the ND Heritage Center have also triggered several recent exhibition projects. We are currently undergoing an extensive upgrade to the security system that monitors both the exhibition galleries and the public spaces. The upgrade involves removing the cables and cameras for the current system and installing the new system’s components. Contractors are running cables throughout the building, which necessitated the temporary removal of exhibition elements in a couple of galleries to ensure the safety of the museum objects.

Work in the James E. Sperry Gallery required completely deinstalling the exhibition The Prairie Post Office. Accessing the existing security cables meant opening several walls and a portion of the ceiling. Once the work was finished, crews installed and painted new walls and the existing carpet was replaced. When the new carpet, paint, and adhesives cure and off-gas, we will reinstall the exhibition.

The refreshed Sperry Gallery awaits the return of The Prairie Post Office.

A similar situation occurred in the Governors Gallery. A portion of Fashion & Function: North Dakota Style was deinstalled to allow contractors to pull cables in that space. The Wedding March section was temporarily removed to protect the objects and allow contractors to move a power lift into the space to access the ceiling. As soon as we get the “all-clear” from the contractors, we will reinstall the platforms and wedding gowns.

Eventually these gallery disruptions will result in an improved exhibition environment. A feature of the new security system is that it generates a heat record for each gallery based on the amount of time gallery visitors linger at any feature, allowing us to see how gallery visitors interact with a space. Hot spots will identify popular areas, and cooler zones may indicate the need to rework a component or reconsider the objects or storyline being interpreted.

Sometimes nature impacts the exhibition’s life. Some of you may recall the flooding that occurred last fall in the Adaptation Gallery: Geologic Time, resulting in part of the gallery’s temporary closure. The flooding was due to the combination of a flat roof, heavy rain, and a failed drain. As part of an effort to mitigate future flooding, the tail section of the Triceratops was recently deinstalled to allow access to the drainage pipes above that portion of the gallery. Connections were tightened and the drain and pipes tested to ensure there won’t be any additional leakage in the future, and the Triceratops got its tail back. So all is good!

Flooding in the Adaptation Gallery: Geologic Time, October 2021.

Exhibition maintenance is a constant and occupies a remarkable amount of time and resources. The Treehouse interactive and learning space on the upper level above the Missouri River Event Center requires almost daily maintenance. We often marvel at how the “unbreakable” gets broken and how even steel bolts are sheared in half. But then we remember the “unsinkable” RMS Titanic and remind ourselves we must always temper our expectations against reality.

In addition to ongoing maintenance projects, we are also working on upcoming exhibitions. On the Edge of the Wind: Native Storytellers and the Land premiers in late April 2023 in the Governors Gallery. The planning and preparation for the new exhibition is well underway. To date, it has already been a two-year production partnership between the State Historical Society and the North Dakota Council on the Arts, with State Folklorist Troyd Geist conducting fieldwork for the project for more than eight years. On the Edge of the Wind will see a complete reinstallation of the Governors Gallery.

Governors Gallery layout for On the Edge of the Wind, which will open in spring 2023.

We are also developing an art exhibition that will occupy the Sperry Gallery beginning next summer, a complete reinterpretation of the Pembina State Museum for installation in 2024, and the America 250 semiquincentennial exhibition that will open in the Governors Gallery in 2025.

With all this planning and maintenance, life is never dull. It may be a bit frantic at times, but it is never dull!

Elizabeth Acheson, Library Processing Intern

Hi! I’m Elizabeth, and I interned in library processing this past summer at the State Archives. The State Archives contains all sorts of resources related to North Dakota, including materials such as manuscripts, photos, books and print publications, oral history records, and digital media records. As a library processing intern, I assisted with various projects involving published materials.

One of my favorite projects from this summer included processing some materials that were being transferred from a different section of the Archives (e.g., manuscripts or photos) to the publications section. One of these collections included the papers of Harry E. Polk (1887-1971). Polk was an editor and owner of the Williston Daily Herald and served as the state director and president of the National Reclamation Association for North Dakota. (You can learn more about him and his materials in the Archives here.) Many of the materials within Polk’s collection concern water management and the Garrison Dam project, a system that was proposed and built in the mid-20th century. The Garrison Dam project was and remains a major factor in North Dakota water management and daily life, and the pros and cons of its building continue to be the subject of debate.

Learning about this event in my college course on North Dakota history gave me a basic understanding of the topic and sparked my interest in discovering more about it. But looking through the various papers, essays, and publications related to water management and the Garrison Dam project gave me a deeper understanding of its full implications.

This is just one brief example of the way the materials within the State Archives can be of use to historians who wish to delve into the history of a subject beyond what a school textbook offers. By preserving and categorizing these materials, the Archives makes historical documents of the past available for use in the present and future.

Kristi Carpenter, National History Day Intern

This summer, I was the National History Day intern at the State Archives. National History Day allows middle school and high school students to create a project on a history topic they find interesting for local and nationwide competitions. It was my job to find those unique areas of documented history and condense them into a guide for these students, and potentially other researchers, to use.

As a University of Jamestown student studying political science with plans to attend law school, I applied for this internship because I like to write and do research. Though I had taken North Dakota history in high school, I had never participated in National History Day and at first had only a very basic understanding of how my research would be used. Our state’s history is known because people took the time to document it. Some of those documents ended up in the collections of the State Archives. I compiled lists of these resources on historical topics into an easy-to-use PDF file. Middle and high school students will eventually be able to access these files for their National History Day projects.

As I gathered this initial research, I learned so much. Every day at my internship, I discovered something I hadn’t known about North Dakota. Some of my favorite finds introduced me to areas of North Dakota’s history that were new to me. One collection contained newspaper clippings about North Dakotan David Henderson Houston. He invented a new type of camera film and sold it to the owner of Kodak. Another collection contained photographs taken by Nancy Hendrickson. As an adult, Nancy used her family homestead as a photographic studio, and her photos were published across the country. Many of her subjects are animals dressed as people. Another interesting collection contained transcripts of letters Theodore Roosevelt sent during his time in North Dakota. I also took an interest in the North Dakota Constitution. A major highlight of my internship was seeing the document in person. The State Archives holds the original, handwritten state constitution, which was created and signed in 1889. This same constitution is still in use despite a failed attempt to rewrite it in the 1970s.

North Dakota history topics are extremely fascinating. I hope that students and all researchers will find these National History Day guides useful!