January conjures up images of cold, snowy days, hockey season, and the excitement of a new year. It is also the time our nation pauses to remember an icon of civil rights and racial equality, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Born on January 15, 1929, King’s birthday is observed as a federal holiday on the third Monday in January to recognize the contributions he made to American history. To honor the holiday, it seems fitting to examine State Archives collection items related to Dr. King.

The State Archives preserves the papers of North Dakota governors, and two former governors — George Sinner and Ed Schafer — have materials related to a commission appointed to coordinate MLK Day observances in the state. Sinner’s papers also hold correspondence and materials related to the first observance of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in North Dakota in 1986, when it became a federal holiday.

One letter from Sinner to Pastor Dan Rothwell of Fargo’s First Assembly of God Church commended the church for having gospel music artist Jessy Dixon appear at the church’s MLK Day event. Murcie Poplar, president of the Children’s Art Institute in Gary, Indiana, sent Gov. Sinner a gift of the Candle Prayer, a commemorative candle created for the holiday to be lit across the nation and world. The original gift was damaged in transport to North Dakota and a replacement was sent.¹

Our newspapers on microfilm provide insight into how local media covered King’s life and influence, including his assassination on April 4, 1968. For example, the April 5 edition of the Grand Forks Herald provided a bold banner headline and pictures. The Jamestown Sun also provided prominent coverage of King’s assassination. Interestingly, the Sun did not cover much of King’s Aug. 28, 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, though given that mining accidents in Utah and Montana occurred in late August 1963, and that King’s civil rights movement activities were largely focused in the eastern part of the United States, this event did not garner the same level of attention in North Dakota.²

The well-known magazine Ebony published a biography of King shortly after his death with many poignant pictures. Ebony has a connection to North Dakota through one-time editor Era Bell Thompson, who grew up in Driscoll, graduated from Bismarck High School, attended the University of North Dakota, and received the governor’s Rough Rider Award.³ Another book in our library stacks, House Divided: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther King by Lionel Lokos (1968), represents an early analysis of King as a civil rights activist. Both titles are available in the reading room during our regular business hours.

In addition, our film collection contains an interesting segment where WDAY in Fargo interviews the Rev. Charles Hughes, a priest in the Fargo Diocese, about the King assassination and the legacy of King’s work. Hughes marched with King in Washington in 1963 and noted that what King feared was “the spiritual death of America through racism,” and that King felt that if his death could prevent that spiritual death, it would be worth it.⁴ This represented a fine example of how one North Dakotan reflected upon the tragic event.

While the State Archives does not have as much on Dr. King compared with other institutions in the nation, we do have an assortment of materials that inform how North Dakota reflected upon King’s life and work, and how earlier generations commemorated his legacy. Despite being removed geographically from the major events of the civil rights movement, important figures like Era Bell Thompson and Judge Ronald Davies (who presided over the Little Rock Nine case) have strong connections to our state. If you visit the ND Heritage Center & State Museum, you can view additional struggles for civil rights, such as the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, in our exhibits.

¹ Governor George A. Sinner to Pastor Dan Rothwell, January 20, 1986; Murcie L. Poplar to Governor George A. Sinner, December 2, 1985; Governor George A. Sinner to Murcie L. Poplar, December 11, 1985, in George A. Sinner Records, Collection #31602, Box 147, Folder 5, State Archives, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck.

² Grand Forks Herald, April 5, 1968; Jamestown Sun, April 5-6, 1968; Jamestown Sun, August 29, 1963.

³ Kathie Ryckman Anderson, “Era Bell Thompson: A North Dakota Daughter,” North Dakota History: Journal of the Northern Plains 49, no. 4 (fall 1982): 11–18.

⁴ Charles Hughes talks with WDAY, April 5, 1968, WDAY-TV, Collection #10351, Core #02446, Segment #00017, State Archives, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck.

What makes compelling exhibit text? I just employed one strategy: opening with a question. Well-crafted exhibits tell stories — both visually through artifacts and photos, and with words by using vivid, concise language to convey colorful, informative histories to our audience.

Ideally, you want the viewer to pause long enough to look, read, reflect, and feel a connection with your topic. Does that anecdote remind them of something a family member told them, or that artifact look just like one in their grandparents’ house? Or, does the exhibit allow the audience to enter a world far removed from their own — either by going back in time, or by exploring a different culture — and yet find a connection through empathizing with a story character, or just from seeing the look in a photographed person’s eyes?

One of my favorite photos of State Historical Society staff, Sept. 5, 1926. Can you relate to the people in the photo? What stories does this image tell? SHSND SA 00200-6x8-00287

When I travel, I like to stop in museums for exhibit text ideas. In this label from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, look at the last paragraph. What is more compelling, saying, “Most of the gold was stolen by thieves,” or, as they do, “Most of the gold was hacked away by plunderers who desecrated the burial”?

In 2018 I viewed the fantastic Stampede exhibit at the Denver Art Museum depicting a broad range of animals in art. In this label titled “Menagerie,” the text is concise, engaging, and clear — and also translated into Spanish for additional audience inclusion.

Currently, our State Museum’s Innovation Gallery: Early Peoples features select quotes and audio of several Indigenous languages. In a similar vein, I loved this painting title at Fundació Joan Miró in Barcelona, but can’t imagine routinely proofreading text in four languages (Catalan, Spanish, English, and French).

This fall I was privileged to draft the exhibit text for our current Prairie Post Office exhibit in the James E. Sperry Gallery. This exhibit is unique in that it is based on a book by the same name, written by K. Amy Phillips and Steven R. Bolduc, published by NDSU Press. The exhibit follows the basic structure of the book and incorporates contemporary photography by Wayne Gudmundson, but also adds artifacts and archival photos and whittles the book text way, way down into digestible exhibit labels. Each chapter received about 150 words, not much longer than this paragraph. I tried to take the major themes of the book and add questions, examples, and surprising facts and ideas I learned thanks to the authors’ research.

Exhibit panels from The Prairie Post Office, on view through 2021.

Finalizing the exhibit text was a team effort: members of our editorial and design team, exhibits team, collections staff, and the book authors all reviewed the text and offered feedback. Just like sustaining life in rural communities — the major theme of this exhibit — creating an exhibit takes a village.

I invite you to come view The Prairie Post Office, spend time (briefly) reading, and let us know what you think.

The State Historical Society of North Dakota owns and preserves 57 state historic sites. Some are well-known staffed sites with buildings and interpreters, while others are lesser known remote sites. For many people, the Cannonball Stage Station probably falls into the latter category. Located about 15 miles southeast of Carson or 18 miles southwest of Raleigh in Grant County, the site is situated off 53rd Avenue SW and is bound by the Cannonball River and plowed farmland. During summer 2019, two new historic interpretive panels were added to the site.

This site overview displays the wooden sign erected by the State Historical Society in 1974 and the two new interpretive signs added in August 2019.

Historic features at the site consist of three depressions marking buildings from the Cannonball Stage Station while it was in operation from 1877 to 1880.

Still photo from drone footage taken in October 2018 by Research Archaeologist Timothy Reed. Historic features are identified with arrows.

The arrows at the top mark two dugouts believed to be from a log building and another unknown structure. The arrow at the bottom identifies the rectangular outline of the barn. Modern features include a sheltered picnic area. After gold was confirmed in the Black Hills by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer’s Army Expedition of 1874 and a treaty opened the area to Euro-Americans, a road was desired to move people and supplies to the area. Bismarck was a favored rail end, and the Bismarck to Deadwood Stage Trail was established to move people, mail, and freight to the Black Hills.

The Northwestern Express, Stage, and Transportation Company and several other independent freighters began operating out of Bismarck in 1877. On average, the journey to Deadwood lasted around 40 hours and encompassed 200 miles. Stages ran from weekly, to biweekly, to triweekly, and eventually daily. The fare was around $23.

The Cannonball Stage Station was the fifth stop along the Bismarck to Deadwood Trail. Several stations on the trail were equipped to be overnight stops and provided meals, but most stations were just places for stage drivers to get a fresh team of horses and for passengers to stretch their legs. The Cannonball Stage Station was presumably one of the latter. While stage stations were typically crude structures, they offered respite for weary travelers and a break from the weather, close quarters, and other elements faced on the journey.

The Weller stage stop, located in McLean County, Dakota Territory, ca. 1883–89, is an example of a standard stage station at the time. As it was bad etiquette to rest your head on another passenger, travelers had to sleep upright in the passenger coaches. While most stage stations offered only a dirt floor to rest on, breaks were presumably a welcome interruption in travel, regardless of amenities. SHSND SA A4193-00001

Passenger coaches on the Bismarck-Deadwood Stage Trail were most often Concord coaches, usually drawn by four horses, or sometimes six for rough terrain. The coaches were constructed for rough travel and built to endure strain. Travel on the Bismarck-Deadwood Stage Trail was generally safe. Dangers included weather, prairie fire, and stage robbery. Outriders and shotgun messengers were employed to ward off “road agents” (bandits) from attacking the stage line after a string of holdups during the summer of 1877. Outriders rode in front and behind the wagon. Shotgun messengers rode beside the driver and were well armed. The term “riding shotgun” was derived from shotgun messengers.

A driver sat at the front of the wagon with his legs braced on the “dashboard.” Mail and light baggage were usually carried on top and held in place by an iron roof rail and ropes. Heavier baggage was usually carried on the rear. Some passengers, at their own risk, rode on top of the coach. Historian Harold E. Briggs records passengers describing a trip on a stagecoach as “not unlike the swell of the ocean.” SHSND SA 0097-46

The Bismarck-Deadwood operated commercially until 1880. The trail and the Cannonball Stage Station were abandoned when railroad expansion reached Pierre. Ruts from the wagon trains can still be seen in some places, including at the Bismarck-Deadwood Stage Trail Historic Marker site east of Flasher. For another view of the Cannonball Stage Station site, check out Timothy Reed’s past blog that includes drone footage filmed in October 2018.

If you ever catch me walking up and down the halls while shaking, twisting, turning, or just generally moving around an object in my hands — congratulations, you’ve met paleontology’s human gyroscope! Paleontology doesn’t own an actual gyroscope — a spinning device that can be rotated many different directions — so we resort to human hands instead. What would this be used for?

When making a casting, a gyroscope can be used to save material by making that casting hollow. Rather than filling up a mold with plastic (a waste of expensive materials), just the outer wall of the mold can be coated. This also gives us the added bonus of being able to measure out weights (steel pellets) to add to the plastic to achieve the weight of the original object. If weights are added, then it is extremely important to keep that gyroscopic motion going, or else you end up with a weeble-wobble object that’s heavy on one end (because all the weight sinks down while the plastic hardens).

Becky mixing glue. Mixing mixing mixing!

Here I am mixing up a batch of glue (butvar-76 plastic dissolved in acetone). You can see the fume hood (window) behind me to make sure all the potential chemical fumes go far, far away. Mixing up a thin version (consolidant) is easy — just pour into our magnetic mixer and away we go! Mixing glue, however, is tricky, and aerobic. You have to KEEP MOVING the bottles for a good hour, or else the not-quite-dissolved plastic sinks down to the bottom of the bottle and sits as an immoveable clump. Then, the next time someone tries to squeeze glue from the jug, they get a squirt of very liquid acetone — while all the glue stays in the bottle.

Some of our behind-the-scenes work is glamorous. Fossils! Prep work! Artwork! Other times, my work is just the necessary tasks that have to happen to make sure those glamorous projects keep going.

In 2017 we received Christmas ornaments from the North Dakota Former Governor’s Residence. The ornaments were gifts from local chapters of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society of North Dakota, Three Crowns Swedish American Association, Sons of Norway, and the Ukrainian Cultural Institute. Starting in 1985, different ethnic-themed Christmas trees were decorated at the residence as each year another group donated ornaments. I have mostly English ancestry and I am not a native North Dakotan, so I was a bit confused by some of the ornaments. A dala horse, stave church, or rosemaled coffeepot with “God Jul” (Merry Christmas) I could understand.

Scandinavian stave church, dala horse, and coffeepot ornaments (SHSND 2017.78.28, 2017.78.2, 2017.78.29)

But what is a tomte, and why were they on the tree? What was up with goat- and pig-shaped ornaments? Why would the Ukrainians put a spider’s web on the tree, or the Norwegians a stabbur (storehouse)? These just didn’t make sense to me, until I did my homework.

Scandinavian stabbur and tomte ornaments (SHSND 2017.78.30, 2017.78.10)

The tomte and the stabbur are related. The Swedes (tomte) and Norwegians (nisse) have similar stories of a small creature with a long white beard wearing a brightly colored conical cap living in the storehouse, or stabbur, on a farm. If the farmer and his family treated the tomte well, it protected the farm and the items stored in the stabbur. If they were bad farmers or were not good to the tomte, it would pull small pranks or even ruin the farm as punishment. Every Christmas Eve, a bowl of sweet porridge or porridge with butter was left for the tomte to keep it happy. Now the tomte figure and stabbur made sense.

I am familiar with camels and sheep, even a donkey or reindeer, on Christmas trees but had never heard of pigs, goats, or spiders. I found out that in Scandinavian countries the Yule Goat might help deliver presents or could be ridden by Santa Claus instead of a sleigh. This idea can be traced back to before Christianity, when it was thought the Norse god Thor had a chariot pulled by two goats. It makes sense how the story of a Norse god with his goats could have been reimagined to be Santa Claus and a goat.

Scandinavian goat ornaments (SHSND 2017.78.13, 2017.78.11)

The pig is a little more complicated. In Germany, marzipan pigs are often gifted as signs of good luck for the new year. In Scandinavia, pork is an important part of the Christmas feast. It is thought that this goes back to the Old Norse religion, where the boar Saerimnir was killed and eaten every night in Valhalla, and sacrifices to the god Freyr were made for a good new year. These stories were combined and reimagined with the introduction of Christianity to become the tradition it is today. This background gave me an understanding of why there is a pig on the tree.

Scandinavian pig ornaments (SHSND 2017.78.1, 2017.78.24)

I found the spider’s web to be a lovely story. According to Ukrainian folklore, a poor family had a Christmas tree, but they had no money to decorate it. The children went to bed sad on Christmas Eve. Early the next morning, the children woke to find the tree covered in cobwebs. When the first rays of sunlight touched the spider’s webs, they turned into silver and gold, and the family was never poor again. Supposedly, this is the origin of tinsel on the Christmas tree. Also, in many European countries, spiders are thought to bring luck, and to destroy a spider’s web before the spider is safely out of the way is bad luck.

Ukrainian spiderweb ornament (SHSND 2017.78.20)

In doing a little research, I learned a lot about Christmas traditions in different cultures and now have a greater appreciation for the diverse Christmas traditions of my adopted state. If you are in Bismarck, stop by the ND Heritage Center & State Museum through Jan. 2, 2020, to view these ornaments on our Community Tree.

This small barn still features typical elements from its construction in 1936: the sliding barn door and the small, centered loft door with a fixed, four-pane window.

In 1934 families of lignite coal miners west of Minot at Burlington faced a bleak future. The Depression was grinding into its fourth year, employment in the coal mines was slack, and people were losing hope. The lignite coal mines never offered much employment, just a few months in the winter. Now the local lignite mines faced stiff competition from out-of-state coal mines that had harder coal that burned hotter, offered at about the cost of local lignite coal thanks to cheaper railroad transportation.¹

Similar grim conditions were everywhere at that time, and the federal solution was to funnel funds to states, as state and local governments, as well as private and religious charities, had traditionally supported people facing hard times. A nonprofit group, the North Dakota Rural Rehabilitation Corporation (NDRRC), received about $100,000 to solve the destitute conditions of about 40 families by providing irrigated land, a house, a small barn, a henhouse, and a privy.

The NDRRC incorporated in 1934, and by late 1935 had purchased 640 acres for irrigable land, pasture, and home sites. It planned a dam on the Des Lacs River to provide gravity-fed irrigation water, and contracted to build about 35 sets comprising a house, barn, henhouse, and privy.² It appears that five families left the area or otherwise did not participate in the program.

The general idea was that the families would work cooperatively to market cash crops such as strawberries, raspberries, and seed carrots to local outlets near Minot. They could also raise hens and gather eggs, and the small barn could easily house a cow and calf as well as agricultural supplies and tools. They rented to own and paid $25 to $35 a month for a few acres of land, shared pasturage, and the house, barn, henhouse, and privy. By the early 1960s the project had reclaimed the $100,000 through rent, 40 percent of the hay crop, and 25 percent of the grain crops.³ The Burlington Homes Project was closely connected to Judge A. M. Christenson, who donated many hours to advance the project’s success.

This Minimal Tradition home has a basement and five rooms, including space for two bedrooms upstairs. The brick chimney, slightly offset door, sets of windows flanking the front door, two windows down, and one window in the apex of the gable end are features found in the Burlington Homes houses. Originally the homes had red cedar shingles, a small shed roof above the front door, and were heated with coal furnaces. From Burlington Centennial, p. 94.

A sturdy but small henhouse with a people door on the gable end. The tiny ventilator and ridge cap are original features of the henhouses.

The architectural firm Van Horn and Ritterbush provided specifications for these small buildings, which included high-quality materials such as fir structural members and red cedar siding, and conservative building practices like 12-inch on-center spacing for the ceiling joists in the small barns. The applicant families apparently had some say in the house design, since some have elevated basements, and some had rough-in plumbing initially while others did not.

The electrician was instructed to provide rough-in electrical wiring and detailed instructions to homeowners on how to wire light fixtures and electrical switches.⁴ One house, recently remodeled, had the outdoor water pump just outside the front door, which provided all the water for domestic purposes, at least initially. The specifications mentioned that the applicant families were to provide their own water well and trenching for the concrete privy vault.

Today the 1.5-story Minimal Traditional homes, small barns, henhouses, and at least one privy still dot the landscape along North and South Project Road just west of Burlington. Many of the homes have been remodeled, but the barns and henhouses are a tangible reminder of difficult times and creative solutions to improve a whole community. In the 1950s some of the lots were offered on a rent-to-own basis to veterans with disabilities, and eventually all of them transferred to private ownership.

Well-preserved barn at TC Landscaping in Burlington, still useful after more than 60 years.

¹ Burlington Centennial, 1883–1983 (self-pub., 1983), 92; “A Brief History: National Association of Rural Rehabilitation Corporations,” accessed Sept. 12, 2019, http://www.ruralrehab.org/briefhistory.html.

² Burlington Centennial, 90; Steven Martens, “Federal Relief Construction in North Dakota 1931–1945,” accessed Sept. 12, 2019, https://www.history.nd.gov/hp/historiccontexts.html.

³ Burlington Centennial, 90. For further background information, see Gudmund Leonard Dalstad, History of the North Dakota Rural Rehabilitation Corporation (Bismarck, ND: self-pub., 1996).

⁴ Specifications for the Burlington Homes Project, 3rd group of buildings, Van Horn Ritterbush Company Collection, box 6, file 47000107, State Archives, State Historical Society of North Dakota, Bismarck.