hbh1 Posts

A little old-school Homegrown music

JennyLindSingers

Homegrown uses music to bring the community together … and so I bring to you one of your homegrown forebears: Ann Colby Albright, who directed hundreds of Duluth ladies and gents back in the 1930s-1950s to sing it out!

Walter Whitehead’s Last Fight

Whitehead_1_ZCPOne time, way back in 1909, two pugilists who’d been exchanging “hard words” around Duluth, tried to evade the law by conducting a prizefight on a scow in the middle of the St. Louis River. This is the story of regional boxing champion Walter Whitehead’s last fight.

Rumble on the River

Meet the Notorious Madam Gain

Read an article on the Queen of Duluth’s Underworld, circa 1908.

Old Howard Mill and the (Possibly) Incendiary Howard Boys

Back in 2009, some folks on PDD wondered about the Old Howard Mill Road, where it went, and who the heck the Howards were. I just wrote an article that sheds some light on that subject, for your reading pleasure.

Above is a photo of the Howard family marker at Forest Hill, with an annoying late afternoon shadow across it.

A Case of Kid Cussedness from 1901

A Letter to the Editor at the Duluth News-Tribune on November 11, 1901:

I would respectively [sic] call the attention of the chief of police to an example of “Hoodlumism” on a street car in your city as I have never witnessed anywhere.

Surely the “kids” are under the surveillance of the police authorities, if the bums cannot be controlled.

Business relative to a burned building called me to Duluth Heights. When I returned to the city, just getting dark, half a dozen passengers came on the car; while passing a store, seven “kids” climbed aboard, and clear down to the incline gave such a specimen of cussedness that would never be tolerated on the Bowery.

Wrestling, scrapping, kicking and yelling, annoying all the passengers, even to insulting two women passengers by throwing one another’s dirty cans into the faces of the women!

A not-so-perfect Duluth day in 1869

Because it’s fun to write about crime if it’s more than a hundred years old, I submit for your reading pleasure an article on Duluth’s first murder.

Writing it made me think of this a lot:

Gangs of New York