How would I describe this summer? Hot! Days like these make me wonder how people in the past stayed cool without air conditioning or enjoyed the outdoors when it was sweltering. After searching through the museum collections, I selected a few items that help explain how they did it and often how we still do it today.

It’s fair to say that women’s bathing suits have gone through a major transformation over the last 100 years. The first swimsuits were made of wool and more like slimmed-down dresses or jumpers with shorts.

A navy-and-white wool swimsuit from about 1900. SHSND 14773.1 

Wearing wool, and so much of it, doesn’t sound like it would provide much relief from the heat. Plus, it would be heavy when wet. It’s no surprise then that coverage rapidly decreased as the century wore on. In the 1970s, Signe Snortland made her own bikini out of stretch synthetic fabric, which dried much quicker than the wool swimsuit from decades before. Her family also enjoyed a refreshing pool in their Bismarck backyard.

Signe Snortland cleans the family inground pool in the 1970s. Her groovy bikini is part of the museum collections. SHSND 2007.13.53 

Can’t fit a permanent pool in your backyard? Consider an inflatable kiddie pool, like the one the Snortland family had in their yard in the 1950s. This plastic wading pool, also in the museum collections, has a green bottom and yellow sides featuring red fish. It is a perfect size and depth to cool down the tiny humans in your family. 

Signe and Kristi Snortland sit in an inflatable kiddie pool in the 1950s. SHSND 2007.13.26

Another refreshing backyard activity is running through the sprinkler. I remember precisely timing my jumps over the sprinkler to be sprayed with the desired amount of water. 

The Nelson Turbo-Heart sprinkler was a staple of 1980s summer days. SHSND 1985.62.1

If you don’t have a yard or don’t want to mess with any sort of pool in your yard, public pools are a great option. Bismarck Parks & Recreation District once sold pool membership patches that attached to your swimsuit. A person could then go to a Bismarck public pool as many times as they wanted for the summer.

Bismarck Pools annual pass patches for 1975, 1981, and 1982 used by the children of Joseph F. Schneider and Vera Wahlman. SHSND 2018.86.1-3

Another way to cool down is to eat cold food such as ice cream. The best place to get ice cream is an ice cream shop. When it is hot outside, one might want an ice cream sandwich. Have you ever wondered how they get the slices of ice cream so even? Well, clearly you need an ice cream sandwich maker in your life. After it slices the ice cream, you press the lever and the ice cream is pushed out, right onto a waiting sandwich. 

Ice cream sandwich maker. SHSND 17880

Ice cream sandwiches can melt quickly though and make a mess. A good way to contain all that mess is to have a shake or malt. This malted milk machine was made by Hamilton Beach and dates to about the 1920s. 

Ice Cream malted milk machine. SHSND 17880

I hope this has given you some ideas to cool down this summer. I might make myself a malt and sit in an inflatable wading pool in my backyard.

While up to my elbows in weeds working in the gardens at the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center, my mind has ample opportunity to wander. The rhythmic action of dislodging a weed to grapple the land back from the wildness of nature creates a flow state. My conscious mind quiets, allowing my unconscious mind to tap into the past, and for a moment the professional and the personal intersect.

Great northern beans in the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center’s Oscar H. Will garden. Our gardens provide a tactile way to share more of our historical content with visitors. The Mandans and Hidatsas were agricultural civilizations; this is an example of what they grew.

The history of many North Dakotans is held in the soil. My German Russian ancestors came to this area with the hope of building a future—a hope carried in seeds and a future held in the crops and produce these seeds would become. They looked to the harvest to sustain themselves and future generations. 

Four-year-old me makes Christmas cookies with my grandmother. Christmas never saw an empty cookie plate.

I could not help but connect my weeding at the Interpretive Center with my grandmothers in their huge gardens and kitchens—saving, storing, canning, and putting by for the coming winters—and my grandfathers out in the fields growing wheat that would be milled for bread. They would gaze at the sky to read the weather, touch the soil to diagnose the conditions. 

You can take the farmer off the farm, but you can’t keep him away from tractors. My grandfather loved “cutting hay” even in his later career working for Dickinson’s park board.

I found myself scanning the skies and crumbling the dirt between my fingertips. I found myself whispering words of encouragement to the seedlings and sprouts I was defending from the thistles and creeping Jenny. I found myself echoing generations of the last 150 years. 

The North Dakota sky draws you in and transports you through time. Notice the vistas and clouds forming on the horizon beyond the Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center: pure magic.

North Dakota may have a reputation of harshness, but it forges within all who grow here a hardiness that can weather every extreme. I often joked with my grandparents that despite all the places they could have chosen to make their lives, they picked, or chose to stay in, North Dakota. But they grew where they were planted, and their resilience in the face of uncertainty was passed down through the generations like my grandfather’s blue eyes.

The lives my grandparents lived wove a thread into the tapestry of my history, my present, and my future. Their endurance, resilience, patience, and love resonate through all their descendants. Theirs was a legacy of stewardship, and we will carry that legacy through every generation that follows. 

We’ve all been shaped and sustained by the land on which we live. We’re all building our lives and our futures from the ground up. The challenges we face year after year are a testament to the abundance of potential here. Facing the weeds and finding the future happening in real time each time I pick up my trowel at the Interpretive Center brings a definite feeling of humbling satisfaction. It transports me back to the hope of my ancestors breaking ground for the first time, the sweetness of the jams canned through the years, and the taste of the fresh bread. The weeds make the bounty more significant and the flavors of success all the richer.