(Learn more about the Bierman scrapbooks here.)

What’s exciting about Mrs. Bierman’s scrapbook on Rice County History is that it adds to the amount of information the Collaborative presents about the communities surrounding Northfield — Dundas in particular. Probably the best thing I can do here is highlight some of the pages for you.

• “Personal Recollections from Indian Days in Rice County,” by F. M. AnDyke
• “Henry M. Rice and the Winnebago,” by Theodore Estabrook
• “Story of Rice County Indians,” by Harriet Shorrocks Johnson
• “Various Nations Share Settlement of Rice County, Typical ‘Melting Pot’ Process Revealed in Story of Local Frontier,” by Arthur J. Larsen
• “Trails and Early Roads of Rice County,” by Maude G. Stewart
• A group of articles about the Rice County environment, including beaver dams, earthen mounds (several), the Big Woods at Nerstrand, and wild pigeons
• “History of the Stone and Stone Industry Around Faribault,” by J. J. Lieb
• “The Mystery of Metropolisville,” by Grace E. McKinstry
• “Nininger City, Now Vanished, Was Hub of Ignatius Donnelly’s Empire,” by Ralph Harmon
• “Early History of Dundas,” by Rev. W. E. Thompson
• Pioneers who contributed to Dundas history, by Mathilda E. Hummel
• Article about the first church services at Dundas
• A paper on Thorstein Veblen, by J. F. Balzer

(Learn more about the Emily Bierman scrapbook here.)

The volume I personally refer to as the third in the series is labeled “Notable Events.” The wide variety of subject matter inside reflects the vagueness of that title. The glue that holds it all together is Northfield, pre-1939.

That’s not to say there isn’t some great stuff inside:

• An obituary of Adelbert Ames, the last surviving Civil War general, who had Northfield ties
• An 1888 invitation to the Masonic Ball at the town’s opera house
• Original photographs from William Howard Taft’s campaign visit in 1908
• Several items about the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), clearly a big interest of Mrs. Bierman’s
• A handful of obituaries
• The 50th anniversary edition of the Northfield News

And then there is one of my favorite things in all the scrapbooks.

Be sure to take a look at this local enlistment roll from the Civil War — the sheet of paper is pretty long, so it is continued on the next two pages. Local historians are fairly certain that it is a copy of the original document, but it is a remarkably well-done copy.

Take a minute to read through the call to arms from the governor’s office:

Whereas, the Government of the United States, in the due enforcement of the laws, has, for several months past, been resisted by armed organizations of citizens in several of the Southern States, who, precipitating the country into revolution, have seized upon and confiscated the property of the nation to the amount of many millions of dollars; have taken possession of its forts and arsenals; have fired upon its flag, and at last, consummating their treason, have, under circumstances of peculiar indignity and humiliation, assaulted and captured a Federal Fort, occupied by Federal troops. And whereas, all these outrages, it is evident, are to be followed by an attempt to seize upon the National Capital and the offices and archives of the Government.

Doesn’t that get you fired up?

What follows these preambles are the signatures of several dozen local men who volunteered to fight for the Union. Can you imagine signing your name to a document like this? A little bit of research has shown us that several of these men died in combat, some at places like Antietam and Bull Run; probably most were wounded at some point; some served closer to home in the U.S.-Dakota War.

Many of those listed served with the 1st Minnesota Volunteer Infantry, Company G. Learn more about them at FirstMinnesota.net and through the Rice County Veterans.

(Learn more about Emily Bierman’s nine scrapbooks here.)

First there was the Early Northfield History volume; next came just plain “Northfield History.”

The majority of this book is obituaries, which researchers will likely appreciate. I’d list them for you here, but the book is full-text searchable! Keep in mind that these are mainly people who a historian in the 1930s thought were worth noting, whether they were prominent townspeople or pioneers of the area.

For example:

• First Rice County Child Dies at 78
• Civil War Nurse With Remarkable Record Dies in Northfield at 92 Years of Age
• Oldest Pioneer Citizen Passes, A. M. Olin … One of Last Few Civil War Veterans
• Death Comes to Mrs. E. J. Thye
• Funeral Rites for Cruttenden Today, Veteran Dentist
• Judge Shields Dies Thursday of Pneumonia
• Tributes of Affection Paid Mrs. Roe at Funeral Service
• An incomplete Ira Sumner obituary, with photograph

If you have any dates or publication information to share, please pass them along. The Junior Curators at the Northfield Historical Society were able to find some of them this summer, but we still need to enter them into the computer. We do know that Mrs. Bierman died in August of 1939, so clippings are older than that date; she also had a stroke in the spring of 1937, so most likely they were published before that time, as well.

(Learn more about Emily Bierman’s nine scrapbooks here.)

The Bierman scrapbook that has the least to do with Northfield specifically is, logically, the one about Minnesota history.

It does contain a smattering of items that are particular to Northfield, though:

• W. W. Payne’s membership certificate for the Minnesota Historical Society from 1879
• A card including a poem by May Eckles Kelly about Castle Rock, which continues on the next two pages
• Items about Minnie Dilley and her involvement at the national level in the Daughters of the American Revolution
• An article about C. H. Watson’s involvement in the U.S.-Dakota War
• The calamity that occurred the year that Northfield was not highlighted on the state map
• Clippings about the formation and activities of the Rice County Historical Society

And a few other things.

Unfortunately, a significant portion of this book could not appear online because it contains clippings from the Minneapolis Journal that are still under copyright. If you are interested in these pages, you can look at photocopies of the original scrapbooks in the Pye Room at the Northfield Public Library.

But it is still worth paging through the online version. One timely article from 1900 recalls the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. (It continues on the two pages following.) A series of steel engravings from the 1850s shows scenes from the state’s early days (also see following pages).

One document that we scanned along with the nine Emily Bierman scrapbooks (learn more about them here) was an index to the books.

Mrs. Bierman did not compile this herself; it was probably done in the 1970s or 80s, as the index also covers four scrapbooks compiled by local history buff Bob Warn, who died in 1977. The Warn scrapbooks are now in the keeping of the Northfield Historical Society and are not currently available online.

I cannot verify how complete or accurate the index is, but it does list about 500 names of Northfielders. Add this index to the full-text searchability of the nine volumes, and you’ve got great odds of finding someone if they’re mentioned.

The index is alphabetical by name; the reference from there is to a scrapbook (see their naming code on the first page) and a page in the scrapbook. Note that these page numbers are the ones written in pencil in the corners of the scrapbook pages.

(Learn more about the Bierman scrapbooks here.)

When we think of the “Do You Remember?” column in the Northfield News nowadays, we think of Maggie Lee. But the column predates her employment there, as Mrs. Bierman’s scrapbook of that name shows. (But if you are interested in Maggie, read some of her first columns from the News here.)

As is the case in newspapers around the country, “Do You Remember?” prior to Mrs. Bierman’s death in 1939 highlighted what was in the local news 25 or 50 years ago, or occasionally contained someone’s personal recollections. Because these columns rarely contained any headlines or text to highlight the subject of the recollection, having these few articles scanned and searchable makes them infinitely more helpful to today’s researcher.

The first 25 pages of this scrapbook are largely “Do You Remember?” columns, with some “Tales of the Town” thrown in — this column was written by Tergiverous Tim, a pen name for W. F. Schilling. But after that point, the volume becomes a mish-mash of articles on local history.

But buried inside is a collection of original photographs. Some we have a little information about:

• Hiram Scriver portrait
• Henry Wheeler portrait — this is the photograph showing Wheeler closest to his age at the time of the raid that Northfield Historical Society has seen
• Portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kelley
• John S. Way portrait
• Old Engine No. 83, Northfield to Red Wing, an engine on tracks with an old depot in foreground — the original version of this photograph, with the caption adhered to the photograph
• Mrs. John Phillips portrait

Others we know less about:

• Nine women playing instruments in a band
• Outside and (presumably) inside the Moore boarding house
• Ladies seated at tables outside the Southworth home
• Portrait of an unidentified man
• And another unidentified man
• A portrait of six people and two donkeys in front of a log wall
• Simpson family portrait of 11 people
• Water-side photographs, Pages 1, 2, 3, 4
• Woman driving a horse outside All Saints Episcopal, unidentified home, All Saints church interior, and shop with Tin, Iron and Furnace Works sign
• Three men in front of a Case machinery shop, Ross Phillips at left and W. E. Hibbard at right, sign reflected in window says Ontario Store (is this in Northfield?)
• Four men with lines of hanging fish
• Ten women in dresses seated on the steps outside of a house
• Large crowd outdoors, most facing background, with horses and buggies in foreground, pole with flag at top in center, and short building in background with people standing on it. Possibly near depot.
• Some sort of community picnic
• Four women, whose last names are Collette, Orr, Whitford and Wickham, in 1895

Do you have information about these — who, when, where? Please share!

Anyone with an interest in Northfield history should be thankful for Mrs. Emily Bierman. Emily Augusta (Sargent) Bierman, 1869 — 1939, was the queen of Northfield history in the 1920s and 30s. She took it upon herself to collect items — primarily newspaper clippings, but also programs, booklets, and some original photographs — that told the tales of the town. And with those items, she assembled nine scrapbooks.

How big of a deal were these scrapbooks? They earned a mention in her obituary. From the Northfield Independent of Aug. 24, 1939:

Mrs. Bierman had many and varied interests, but she was perhaps best known in the community for her work on local history. Assiduously collecting newspaper clippings, printed programs, letters, and other materials bearing on the life and activities of the Northfield territory, she accumulated a large collection of valuable material now deposited in the form of scrapbooks in the Northfield public library and in the archives of the local DAR.

Today, the nine scrapbooks all live at the Northfield Public Library, locked safely away due to their age and value. Photocopies of the book are available to view in the library’s Pye Room, but the 1,500+ pages are a lot to wade through if you’re looking for something specific — or even if you’re not.

I am so pleased to announce that all nine scrapbooks have been scanned and are available to view online 24/7 through the Northfield History Collaborative — even better, they are full-text searchable. The first volume has now been available online for more than a year; the remainder were processed this summer thanks to a new Legacy Grant from the state of Minnesota.

Obviously, this collection will be extremely useful for the researcher of Northfield history. Northfield Historical Society Director Hayes Scriven found that in the year the first scrapbook was online, a significant number of the research requests he received were sparked by items that people found by Googling their subject and ending up inside the scrapbook. Pages from one of the scrapbooks are part of the new U.S.-Dakota War exhibit at NHS. Short of all old Northfield papers being digitized, this may be the next best thing for the internet history detective.

Newspaper clippings probably make up 85 percent of the content — unfortunately, Mrs. Bierman didn’t identify the publications or dates she clipped from. A smattering of booklets and programs add some more local color.

Then there are the original photographs.

There are few things more rewarding after the monotony of scanning page after page than the
amazement on the faces of Hayes Scriven and Chip DeMann when they see some of the original photographs pasted to the pages. Back in the first scrapbook on Early Northfield History, there were the cartes-de-visite of Joseph Lee Heywood, his wife, and his little daughter. In one of the newer volumes, it’s the original photograph of Henry Wheeler, which the two say is the closest they’ve ever seen to Wheeler’s age at the time of the 1876 bank raid.

Special thanks to the Northfield Public Library, for preserving these books and allowing the Collaborative to scan them; to the late Mrs. Bierman, for her faithful work and foresight in compiling them; and to the NHS Junior Curators, who cut tissue paper to line the 1,500+ pages.

Instead of going on and on about how fantastic they are, I will leave you with links to the nine scrapbooks and their index. Look for individual blog posts about each scrapbook in the days and weeks to come.

• Early Northfield History
• Northfield History
• Notable Events
• St. Olaf College
• Northfield Organizations
• Carleton College
• Do You Remember?
• Rice County History
• Minnesota History
• Index to Northfield History Scrapbooks

Learn more about how to use our site in this blog post.

There are thousands of pages of materials about Northfield’s history in the Northfield History Collaborative. Let us give you some tips on how to use our program.

If you go to our homepage, www.northfieldhistorycollaborative.org, there is a search box in the upper right-hand corner of the page. It’s important to note that that box only searches the WordPress portion of our site — the pages with the sky blue on the edges, or that have “northfieldhistorycollaborative” in the web address. These are the introduction pages to each of our partners, as well as our blogs — it does not include the actual content of the Collaborative.

The box below the rotating photographs is where you’ll find options to search the contents of the Collaborative. In the upper-right corner of that box, you have the option to do an advanced search of the Collaborative’s content in our ContentDM site, browse all of the items, or search by keyword within the whole collection or individual partner collections.

All of these options will bring you into ContentDM, which is the program we use to show and describe content online. This is hosted for us very kindly by Carleton College.

From within ContentDM, you always have the option to do a simple keyword search of the collection from a box in the upper right-hand corner.

At the top of the ContentDM main page (contentdm.carleton.edu), you have the option to browse the collections. If you choose that option, you’ll find a drop-down menu near the top left of the page that allows you to choose a collection. You’ll find a number of the college’s collections there, as well as collections for the other 11 partners in the Collaborative. Click “Go” after you’ve selected a collection.

Near the upper-right of the results page, you’ll see whether you have more than one page of results, and you’ll be able to navigate through those pages. Click on a title to see an item.

If you want to search the Collaborative, choose “Advanced Search” from the top bar of the page. There are a number of options there: searching across all fields, searching across selected fields (title, creator, etc.), searching across all of the collections, or just inside one or two. For example, Carleton’s “Miscellany” and “Algol” collections are quite large. If you exclude them from your search, assuming you aren’t interested in them, you’ll have less results to wade through.

Once you’ve selected a title, knowing how to use the item viewer makes a big difference!

For example, take a look at this memorial sermon for Bishop Whipple.

• In the upper left corner, you can search the text of the object. Try entering “Whipple,” and hit enter. You’ll notice on the left that some of the page numbers have red brackets and asterisks next to them. Click on them to see the pages where the computer (which is not perfect) found the word “Whipple.” When you look at the page on the right, it will highlight that word in red.
• Below the “search” box in the viewer, ContentDM will tell you the number of “hits,” or times it found your search term. You can use “previous hit” or “next hit” to go through the results without scrolling down the list of pages. Two lines below that, you can navigate “previous page” and “next page.”
• The bar to the right of the search box allows you to manipulate the image you’re looking at. The first two icons let you zoom in and out. The next box allows you to type in a specific zoom percentage. If your image is bigger than the viewing window, the next four arrows let you move the image up, down, left and right. (Note the scroll bar on the side as well.) The next three icons let you view at maximum resolution, fit the image to the window height-wise, and fit the image to the window width-wise. The two icons after that are for rotating the image left or right; the second to last makes a thumbnail appear in the lower-left corner; and the last opens the image in a new window, where you can crop it down to just the part you want to see.
• The other important feature that’s perhaps least obvious is the drop-down menu below the search box in the upper left corner. Choosing “document description” (and clicking “go”) provides you with important data we’ve entered about the document you’re looking at as a whole. You’ll see its title, a brief description, its physical format, subject headings, the name of the owning institution, rights management info, and more. “Page description” will give you specific information about the page you’re looking at, including a transcription of the text on the page. This is especially helpful if you are looking to copy and paste, particularly if your item is handwritten and we’ve provided a transcription. (See note at the end of this post.) “Page and Text” opens a new window and lets you see the image and its transcription side-by-side — again, a great feature for handwritten documents like this. The last two drop-down options are for those who want to save a PDF version of the images — the first if you want to save only one or a few pages, the second for all of them.

We hope that better understanding our programs helps you to find them more useful!

Note: Almost all of the items in our collection have searchable text. If you find an item that does not, please let me know about it at ariel.emery.butler at gmail.com.

In case you didn’t read the last scrapbook update:

Thanks for checking in on the progress of the Bierman scrapbooks! If you received your Scriver Scribbler in the mail today, you might be here looking for links to them. Unfortunately, they’re taking just a little longer to process than anticipated.

If you did read the last update:

Thanks for checking in again! Sometimes you can’t beat technology. Seven scrapbooks and the index are now available online; we’re hoping for the last two on Wednesday.

Until then, here’s what’s up so far.

• (uploaded last year) Early Northfield History scrapbook
• Northfield History scrapbook
• Notable Events scrapbook
• Carleton College scrapbook
• St. Olaf College scrapbook
• Rice County History scrapbook
• Minnesota History scrapbook (some of the pages are on display at NHS)
• Index to the scrapbooks

Again, we’re hoping that “Northfield Organizations” and “Do You Remember?” will become available on Wednesday. Thanks for your patience!

Thanks for checking in on the progress of the Bierman scrapbooks! If you received your Scriver Scribbler in the mail today, you might be here looking for links to them.

Unfortunately, they’re taking just a little longer to process than anticipated. The final four scrapbooks are slated to go online on Aug. 27.

Until then, there are five scrapbooks and the index to check out! Find links to them below.

• (uploaded last year) Early Northfield History scrapbook
• Northfield History scrapbook
• Notable Events scrapbook
• Carleton College scrapbook
• Minnesota History scrapbook (some of the pages are on display at NHS)
• Index to the scrapbooks

On Monday, look for scrapbooks on Northfield Organizations, St. Olaf College, Do You Remember?, and Rice County History. At that time, I will also post a blog post about the whole collection, and posts about individual scrapbooks will follow.