Now online at the Northfield History Collaborative: Minutes from one of Northfield’s earliest organizations, the Lyceum Society.

To be exact, these are typewritten transcriptions of the original minutes, done decades ago by an unknown person. We hope to someday have scans of the originals to share, as well! Those reside at the Rice County Historical Society.

“Believing in the utility of societies for intellectual improvements — We, citizens of Northfield, agree to unite ourselves into an association for the purpose of establishing a Reading Room — Circulating Library, and Debating Society,” a group declared in their 1856 constitution. (That document and bylaws precede the meeting minutes.) The minutes here span to December 7, 1863. Enjoy!

In the coming week, Northfielders will remember longtime Northfield News writer and editor Maggie Lee, who died Monday, July 8, at 92. She was also a founder of the Northfield Historical Society. Today the Collaborative celebrates her life with these photographs and programs.

On a personal note, I worked with Maggie for several years. Some of the things I will remember her for:

• Even when she was in her late 80s, Maggie came in to the the newspaper office on Saturdays;
• She loved Northfield history;
• The purple and the cats, of course — she even kept pictures of her cats in her purse! I seem to remember her once telling me she didn’t necessarily start wearing purple all of the time because she loved it, but someone complimented her once on a purple outfit, and eventually she wore the color so often that people expected it. Later when I asked her about that story, though, she couldn’t remember it;
• She stopped every day to pet the cat at the pet store;
• She was allergic to lots of things. I remember her saying that she couldn’t be nursed as a baby and they had to use some cutting-edge substitutes for that time.
• She was born in the Northfield Hospital when it was at Eighth and Water streets. Her telling me that was the first time I learned there was a hospital at that location;
• Maggie had lots of snacks — in her desk drawer, or in a little baggie when she was paging through the bound newspapers;
• She liked root beer floats at the Cocoa Bean;
• The one day she didn’t wear her wig to work;
• She got around! A street view of Google Maps pictured her crossing the street at Union and Fourth in 2007.
• But she always sat in the same place at church.

Items in the Northfield History Collaborative are viewed online through a generous partnership with Carleton College. The college uses a common content management system called ContentDM to organize these materials.

Over the past week, Carleton completed its upgrade to a newer version of ContentDM. In addition to a new look, improvements include a wider image-viewing window and social media components — users can now tag items, rate items, leave comments, and share items via 300+ social media programs.

Pop on over to see the new system! Learn more about how to use ContentDM here.

Please note that objects in the Northfield History Collaborative may be unavailable June 25-27 as Carleton College upgrades to a newer version of ContentDM. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to sharing the viewer improvements with you.

You want to take care of your organization’s materials and preserve them for future generations. But what do you save? What do you throw? And how do you store the things you keep? How do you best use the time you have for preservation? And why is it important?

The Northfield History Collaborative will host a free workshop focused on the care and handling of books, papers, and printed photographs in a business or organizational setting on May 3. The event, for partner organizations and potential partners, will be held from 8:30 a.m. to noon in the Larson Room 236 (formerly the library) at the Carleton College Weitz Center for Creativity, 320 3^rd St E.

Check-in for the workshop begins at 8:30 a.m., with the program to commence at 9 a.m.  Topics to be covered include preservation basics, how to decide what to keep, options for heavily-used materials, where to get supplies, and the do’s and don’ts of handling and storage. Presenters will include professionals from the Northfield and Rice County historical societies and from St. Olaf and Carleton colleges.

The 30 spaces for the workshop will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis. Contact Collaborative Project Coordinator Ariel Butler at butler@northfieldhistory.org or call the Northfield Historical Society at 645-9268 to register.

The free workshop is funded by a Legacy Grant through the Minnesota Historical Society to the Collaborative. The Northfield History Collaborative is a partnership of 12 groups in town who work together to digitize materials that tell Northfield’s diverse history. Check out more than 5,000 objects at www.northfieldhistorycollaborative.org.

Think about the stories of your parents, grandparents, or great grandparents that are now lost forever – their experiences living through world wars, the polio epidemic, or the Great Depression, or of immigrating to a strange new land.  We may have small snippets of our family’s history – a few snapshots of people and places we do not recognize, letters home from the war, a tattered hand-made quilt – but the personal stories behind them that bring history to life may be gone.

The four-part series, Preserving Your Family’s Stories, is a collaborative effort between the FiftyNorth and theNorthfield History Collaborative, a program of the Northfield Historical Society to present information and guide participants in the collection and celebration of their family’s life stories.  Staff and volunteers from the Northfield, Rice County, and Minnesota Historical Societies and the Northfield Senior Center will lead the classes and provide individual assistance on each of the topics covered.  Optional additional work sessions with the presenters will be available on the Saturday following each class.  All classes will be held at the Northfield Senior Center.  The cost for all four classes and the follow-up sessions is $50 for members of the Northfield Senior Center or the Northfield Historical Society, $60 for non-members.  Individual sessions are $15/members, $20/ nonmembers.

Continue reading »

New photographs and documents in the Northfield History Collaborative collection help tell the early story of the Northfield Hospital.

Scans of the first minutes book of the Northfield Hospital Association tell the story from its beginning. The first page describes how, in 1910, the local International Order of Odd Fellows Home had decided to no longer operate the hospital on its grounds. They offered to rent the facility to a hospital board for $60/month.

The private Northfield Hospital Association operated from the Odd Fellows Home for just a few months before they decided to relocate. On Sept. 17, 1910, the board took the following action:

“It was decided after considerable discussion to refuse to accept the lease offered by the board of directors of the I.O.O.F. Hospital. After due consideration the secretary was instructed to buy the [S. D.?] Schilling house Cor. 8th Street and east Water street for the sum of $4500.00 to be used for hospital purposes.”

A photograph of the rear of that house is among the 20 added this winter. The house still stands today.

Among the other new photographs is one of three young women who were injured during the Defeat of Jesse James Days in the 1960s. Writing on the back of the photograph indicates they were from a drum and bugle corps in St. Paul and were riding on the side of a fire truck when it tipped over while taking a sharp curve.

On the lighter side, there are a few images of the Northfield Hospital nursery in the 1950s-1970s, including their isolette equipment and a baby being weighed inside an isolette. (If the nurse has fully let go of the infant — which it’s not clear she has — it appears the infant weighed either one or 11 pounds!)

About a quarter of the Northfield Arts Guild theater programs that ever existed are now available online.

The Arts Guild has a dream of making all of its programs available online and searchable in an Internet Movie Database (IMDb.com)-type format. This addition of 97 programs brings them a significant part of the way toward that goal.

Through the ContentDM interface that the Collaborative uses (through a generous partnership with Carleton College), these programs are full-text searchable already (or will be very soon — transcriptions for the handwritten programs will be available in the coming weeks). Want to know how many of these productions the legendary Myrna Johnson was involved with? A search shows that it’s at least 70 of the 97.

Maybe you’re going to put on a production of “Amahl and the Night Visitors” and you want to look into how the Arts Guild did it previously. You’ll find programs from four past performances.

Take a look around. You’ll find that friends, neighbors, or family members have been involved with the Arts Guild in ways you never suspected, or maybe you’ll look back on some fond memories.

I’m particularly excited about these latest additions to the Collaborative from St. John’s Lutheran Church of Northfield. Church records give us clues to our ancestors’ everyday lives that sometimes other documents can’t. We get an idea what was important to them and who some of the people they really knew were. Just now, St. John’s is the Collaborative’s only church partner, but as we grow, we hope to change that and make accessible many more of these types of things.

New to this collection are 74 photographs and scans of the church’s earliest record book.

The photographs are a selection from hundreds in the church archives. These include mainly images of their first and second buildings, along with some photographs of pastors, staff, and congregants.

One that makes my jaw drop: The only known image of the interior of St. Johannes Lutheran Church, their first building at the corner of Washington and Fourth streets.

Other photographs include one of four early pastors, a portrait of the 1945 children’s choir, a portrait of European refugees (or “displaced persons”) brought to Northfield by the church in the 1950s, and an image of the congregation and the St. Olaf College Band outside the St. Johannes building. Of personal interest to me is a pink house that stood near the church; it was moved in the late 1980s to make way for a building expansion, and I remember watching the house go down the street!

Perhaps the more significant addition for researchers are the scans of the church’s earliest record book, covering the years 1867 to 1880. This book was microfilmed in the past, but the original is delicate and has been locked away. Scans available online keep the original safe but also make it available around the world 24/7 — and even better, it’s searchable.

Don’t be intimidated that the book is in Norwegian. The vast majority of it is names, and the formatting of the pages makes the meaning of the Norwegian words pretty obvious.

Sections of the book include a membership list, baptisms, confirmations, marriages, funerals, and communions. Of particular local interest is the list of funerals, including an entry for one “Nicolaus Gustavson,” a bystander killed in the raid on the First National Bank.

Tell us what interests you! What types of materials from St. John’s Lutheran Church would you like to see in the Collaborative? What other local churches would you like to see materials from? Leave comments here or contact me at butler (at) northfieldhistory.org.

This latest addition of 300+ images to the Collaborative collection of the Northfield News is a great illustration of why the Collaborative exists.

The News has thousands of photographs, in addition to (obviously) news clippings and 100+ years of newspapers, but someone researching Northfield history wouldn’t necessarily think to look there for photographs. A central, online database of local history resources helps researchers to know what they have.

(Side note: One other feature you’ll be seeing more of at the Collaborative is surveys and summaries of the collections of our partners. Here, you can check out a survey of the items held at the Northfield News.)

If you enjoy seeing scenes from old Northfield, it’s well worth the time to browse through this collection. They have so many fascinating images that I really don’t know where to start in highlighting them for you. I managed to narrow it down to my top 15, in no particular order.

1. Greenvale Park Elementary School under construction (aerial view)

2. Northfield High School post-construction (aerial view) – notice that this is before the D and M wings, and before the District Office

3. Northfield Retirement Center under construction (aerial view)

4. United Methodist Church under construction (aerial view) – notice the sparse homes looking to the north

5. South side of Bridge Square before the Post Office – the Scriver Building is just out of view at left

6. Gas station that stood where Post Office is now – notice the Central Block spire in the center back, and the roof of the Scriver Building at back right

7. Old Catholic church – the tiny sign on the post says “Linden St.”

8. Highway 3 meets Water and Third streets (aerial view) – this is after what’s now Highway 3 runs through the area, but before the current parking lot, so Water Street and Highway 3 kind of intersect at Second Street. Looks dangerous.

9. Looking down Third Street toward Basil’s – going even further back than the previous image, we see that Third Street was a busy area before buildings were knocked down for Highway 3 to be routed through

10. Northfield Fire Department with horses in front of what is now Anna’s Closet and The Contented Cow

11. Northfield Public Library, original section

12. Temperance Union parade float: ‘The Saloon Wants Your Boys – Is Your Boy Safe?’ – parade in the 400 block of Division Street, headed for Bridge Square

13. President Taft in Bridge Square – probably about 1908. The building behind him is Northfield National Bank, which stood where Neuger Communications is now.

14. Huge tents in Bridge Square – a carnival or circus. Notice the massive amount of space they cover. Also notice the old mill in the background on the bank of the river.

15. Troops march through Bridge Square in the 1910s, headed for Mexican border – I find this image moving. It makes these local men heading out for military service feel very real.