History Posts

Postcard from West Superior Street

This undated postcard, published by W. G. MacFarlane, shows Superior Street in Downtown Duluth with the Lyceum Theatre at left and Spalding Hotel at right marking the intersection of Fifth Avenue West. The Maurices headquarters and Ordean building and plaza occupy those corners today.

I Was Left for Dead at Nopeming Sanatorium in the 1918 Fire

(Excerpts from Scions of Cloquet by Jean-Michel Cloquet, 1946, out of print)

I was left for dead at Nopeming sanatorium in 1918, as the Cloquet-Duluth-Moose Lake fire combined with World War I, tuberculosis, and the influenza pandemic just hitting the northland. I’d brought my tuberculosis home with me from the filthy trenches of the Somme. There wouldn’t be an armistice for a month. Reaching Duluth, I was trucked on the dirt road to Nopeming with other infected veterans, fresh off the hospital ship. There we met citizens suffering from the homegrown TB outbreak traced to sewage in Lake Superior. That’s the Duluth I returned to. I’d barely survived overseas, evading German flamethrowers. Some of my trench-mates weren’t so lucky. Now I was barely surviving even though I was stateside, too sick to be properly shell-shocked from the omnipresent global crisis. So they tucked us away 10 miles outside of town in the forest sanatorium. Its name is Ojibwe for “in the woods.” The woods that burned.

Postcard from the Proposed Court House Group in Duluth

This undated postcard depicts plans for the Duluth Civic Center, a cluster of government buildings that includes the St. Louis County Courthouse (1909), Duluth City Hall (1928), Gerald W. Heaney Federal Building (1930), St. Louis County Jail (1923) and the Soldiers and Sailors Monument (1919).

Zombie Media: Honey West, the Girl from Uncle and More

I’m still amazed at the media I am finding around town — especially since Best Buy announced it will no longer sell movies or TV shows on DVD or Blu Ray. Will we see a resurgence in the medium in ten years, as vinyl and even cassettes have come back lately?

Postcard from Spruce Point Motel in Beaver Bay

Featured here are two undated postcards from Gallagher’s Studio of Photography that promote the Spruce Point Motel in Beaver Bay. The older card shows how it was originally a one-story structure before the second story was added.

Free Republic of Duluth Funnies, 2005

Below are artifacts from the Richardson brothers 2005 Free Republic of Duluth events. The idea was a Duluth secession into a city-state embodying Situationist ideas of art-as-life. It culminated in a community art event at Washington Studios where these were displayed. Allen and I created these in the spirit of détournement, the practice of subverting commercial art like comic strips to revolutionary ends. Our house became a collaborative artspace freakout, reflected in the fact that the lettering in the last strip was done by someone I can’t remember, it could have been anyone, some citizen of the Free Republic …

Mystery Photo: McDowell Sisters

This old cabinet card photo, for sale on eBay, was shot in Duluth. Several details are provided, but some mysteries persist.

Gunnar Birkerts and Intuitive Synthesis: The Place of the Duluth Public Library in the History of Modern Architecture

Duluth Public Library in the November 1980 issue of Architectural Record.

Last month, an article appeared in the Duluth News Tribune about the decision to demolish the Duluth Public Library and replace it with something smaller in a shared building. The reasons provided for demolition instead of restoration mostly involve challenges to reprogramming and subdivision created by structural pillars, expensive building systems like insulation in serious need of replacement, and other issues related to years of deferred maintenance.

The History of Cloquet, Pierre the Pantsless Voyageur and Duluth’s Missing Vermeer

Excerpts from Scions of Cloquet by Jean-Michel Cloquet (1946, out of print)

“In 1820, when he was 17 years old, the Frenchman Pierre Cloquet boarded a packet ship in Le Havre and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean. He was trying to escape his father, like many of us try to do, perhaps all of us. He just wanted a little peace and quiet. By a certain measure, he found it in the territory eventually known as Minnesota. Pierre (or Grandpère Cloquet as my brother and I refer to him) became a legendary voyageur and fur trader 20 miles southwest of Duluth, trapping, hunting, and occasionally bear-wrestling. Over two decades of working for the American Fur Company, he built his own trading post where metal tools shipped in and beaver pelts shipped out. He gradually adopted native dress, and he married into a Black-Ojibwe family out of Michigan, sought-after guides and translators. And, right around the collapse of the beaver pelt industry in 1843, he inadvertently founded the town of Cloquet.

Postcards from Bill’s Mount Silver Motel and Cabins

The postcard above, and the one below, were both published by Gallagher’s Studio of Photography circa the 1950s. And both were made to promote Bill’s Mount Silver Motel and Cabins on Silver Cliff Bay, northeast of Two Harbors. The location now features private residences.

Poet Laureate Collection unveiled at UMD

The Twin Ports area has long been a literary center for Minnesota. Now, the history of the literary community in Duluth is open and available to researchers and readers alike in the Archives and Special Collections of the Kathryn A. Martin Library at the University of Minnesota Duluth. The Poet Laureate Program is the heart of a collection of materials available to the public.

Twain’s coldest winter revisited

Dave Wilton at wordorigins.org delves into a famous-though-probably-inaccurate Mark Twain quote in his latest article. “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” has of course also been spun as “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in Duluth.” Wilton covers it all in detail, as did Tony Dierckins some years ago on zenithcity.com. Lake Superior Magazine also covered the subject in 2003.

Duluth and the Harbor from Highway 11 in 1923

Photo by William L. Barker, Jr. for the U.S. Forest Service.

This photograph from the National Archive is dated Oct. 1, 1923 — 100 years ago today. The caption reads: “Duluth and the harbor on Lake Superior from Highway #11.”

Minnesota in the ’70s: Sigurd Olson, Reserve Mining Case, etc.

This 2013 Twin Cities Public Television documentary provides a few snippets related to the state’s northeast corner, including Duluth. The show was produced with the Minnesota Historical Society Press and inspired by the book Minnesota in the ’70s by Dave Kenney and Thomas Saylor.

Duluth Arrow Chevrolet

The Arrow Chevrolet West was on the corner of Grand Avenue and 59th Avenue West — the modern-day location of City Center West. (Photo via University of Minnesota Duluth Archives and Special Collections)

I am looking for folks with information about either Duluth location of Arrow Chevrolet — West Duluth or Downtown.

Chevy dealers across the country were sponsors of the Soap Box Derby and I am hoping to get a few folks to respond with their memories of the Arrow Chevrolet clinics and parts distribution. Did you race the Soap Box Derby? What memories of the Chevy dealers do you have?

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