History
PDD Quiz: Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Step up to the plate for this baseball-themed PDD quiz! For more on Duluth baseball history, check out the Zenith City website and the Minnesota Digital Library.
The next PDD quiz will review the headlines from June 2022; it will be published on June 26. Submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by June 22. (more…)
Postcard from the Duluth Depot
The message on the back of this Union Depot postcard is dated June 8, 1912 — 110 years ago today. The names are tricky to read, but the sender signs off from Detroit, Mich. and the recipient was in Beaver Dam, Wis. (more…)
View in the City of Duluth Circa 1872
This image from a stereograph circa 1872 shows a view of Superior Street in Downtown Duluth looking eastward from roughly First Avenue West. The odd-shaped building in the upper right corner of the image is the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad Grain Elevator A, which was on the shore of Lake Superior at about Fourth Avenue East. (more…)
Video Archive: The First Half-century of Goldfines in Business
This 50-year-old film is a sort of unproduced mini-documentary about Duluth’s Goldfine family, with particular emphasis on their roles as civic leaders. The family’s entrepreneurial story in Duluth goes back to 1922, so it can be viewed today as marking a full century of Goldfine family enterprises in the city. (more…)
Minnesota Historia: The Chief Buffalo Memorial Project
Artist Moira Villiard presents a tour of the Chief Buffalo mural and the origin story of Downtown Duluth.
Minnesota Historia is a six-part WDSE-TV web series dedicated to Minnesota’s quirky past. It is hosted by Hailey Eidenschink and produced/edited/written by Mike Scholtz.
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978
This 10-minute documentary on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978 was produced by Sam Fulton and Mark Rogalski for National History Day on the theme of “Debate & Diplomacy.” The process paper and bibliography is at mn.nhd.org.
Postcard from Duluth’s Lincoln Park Pond
This 110-year-old postcard offers an illustrated view of the pond at Lincoln Park. The sender of this card, Anna Carlson, was kind enough to pencil her name on the front. The card is postmarked May 22, 1912 and the recipient is Mildred Wilkenson of Clare, Mich., courtesy of H. Hales. (more…)
Minnesota Historia: Hunting for Ancient Agates
What is it about agates that cause such an obsession? Let the experts in Moose Lake, the Agate Capital of the World and home of the Agate Stampede, fill you in.
Minnesota Historia is a six-part WDSE-TV web series dedicated to Minnesota’s quirky past. It is hosted by Hailey Eidenschink and produced/edited/written by Mike Scholtz.
Have you seen Rollo, the Limit?
Big names have performed in Duluth in the past — you’ll find prideful mention of celebrities such as Louis Armstrong, Charlie Chaplin and Buddy Holly having graced our grounds with their talents. But alarmingly missing from this impressive list of notables is Rollo the Limit, the roller skating daredevil. (more…)
Duluth aerial photos, then and now, compared and combined
Sometime back, I included an aerial photo in a PDD comment and realized that because they are taken from straight overhead, the photos on Minnesota Historical Aerial Photographs Online can be matched up pretty easily with Google’s current aerial imagery. And then I put that thought aside for quite some months until I finally came back to it and put together this seven-part series of aerial photos showing places in Duluth that have changed somewhat dramatically over the past decades. (more…)
Ripped in Superior’s East End in 2002
[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. The Sultan of Sot visited drinking establishments in the East End of Superior for this article, which appeared in the May 1, 2002 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper. A few updates: The Office went out of business in 2015. East End Tavern and Hudy’s Bar remain in business. Mr. B’s later became Pudge’s]
I set out looking for Eddie’s Ribs in Superior’s Itasca neighborhood, following the left-handed, pencil-scrawled directions of some coffin-dodger I met at the Pioneer Bar in Duluth. At some point, I take a turn that I’m pretty sure is incorrect, driving into an area that common logic would demand turn into either a suburb or a swamp, when suddenly — whoa! — a bunch of bars. Needless to say, it’s at this point that the whole big-plate-of-ribs idea is immediately jettisoned to make way for the get-hammered-right-here-and-now idea. It’s a common occurrence in my life. (more…)
Duluth: A Great Place to Visit and an Even Better Place to Live
The aerial view of Bayfront Park during its yellow canopy days at the five-second mark of this 1991 Duluth tourism promo is perhaps the highlight.
Postcard from the Duluth-Superior Hi Bridge
Before the Blatnik Bridge was named for Congressman John A. Blatnik in 1971, it was called the Duluth-Superior Bridge and known colloquially as the “High Bridge,” but for some reason it shows up on a few postcards as the “Hi Bridge,” as if people were supposed to wave and say Minnesota-nice hellos as they crossed. (more…)
Minnesota Historia: The Root Beer Lady
Dorothy Molter was the last permanent resident of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. She sold candy bars and homemade soft drinks to paddlers for decades. But there’s so much more to her story than root beer.
Minnesota Historia is a six-part WDSE-TV web series dedicated to Minnesota’s quirky past. It is hosted by Hailey Eidenschink and produced/edited/written by Mike Scholtz.
Postcard from the Hotel Duluth in 1942
This postcard was mailed 80 years ago today — May 12, 1942. The recipient was Constance Jarvis of Riverside, Calif. Ray Boyer sent it from Duluth. (more…)
Minnesota Historia: Superior Shipwrecks
Everybody knows the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the most famous shipwreck on Lake Superior. But what are the next five most fascinating shipwreck stories on the big lake called Gitchi Gumee? And is the #2 shipwreck story the scariest thing you’ll ever hear?
Minnesota Historia is a six-part WDSE-TV web series dedicated to Minnesota’s quirky past. It is hosted by Hailey Eidenschink and produced/edited/written by Mike Scholtz.
Postcard from Duluth’s Grand Opera House
Duluth’s Grand Opera House at 333 W. Superior St. was designed by George Wirth and opened in 1883. It was destroyed by fire on Jan. 28, 1889. (more…)
Minnesota Historia: The Legend of St. Urho
As the patron saint of Finland, St. Urho is famous for casting the grasshoppers out of the country and saving their grapes. Except, of course, none of that ever happened. St. Urho was invented out of thin air in the 1950s by the manager of a department store in Virginia, Minn.
Minnesota Historia is a six-part WDSE-TV web series dedicated to Minnesota’s quirky past. It is hosted by Hailey Eidenschink and produced/edited/written by Mike Scholtz.
Video Archive: Homegrown 2017 Movie
Sam Tuthill put together this documentary from select performances during the 2017 Homegrown Music Festival. (more…)
Postcard from Fifth Avenue West and Superior Street
One of the more common postcard views of Duluth in the early 1900s was the scene looking east down Superior Street from Fifth Avenue West, showing off the Spalding Hotel (right) and Lyceum Theatre (left).
The Spalding was demolished in 1963, and the Lyceum came down in 1966. The Ordean building now stands in the Spalding location; the Maurices headquarters in the Lyceum spot.
Minnesota Historia: Duluth’s Doomed Olympics Bid
WDSE-TV presents the story of an Olympics that never happened in a city that never stopped dreaming.
Minnesota Historia is a six-part web series dedicated to Minnesota’s quirky past. It is hosted by Hailey Eidenschink and produced/edited/written by Mike Scholtz.
Postcard from Arch Street in Cloquet, 1912
Sidney Dahl of St. Cloud was the recipient of this postcard mailed 110 years ago today — April 23, 1912. The sender’s name was Ingga. (more…)
It’s LTD Duluth!
This Twin Cities Public Television documentary, broadcast circa 1980, has a brief but kind-of-sexy Duluth moment. A clip from a Northland Ford commercial at the 12:12 mark of the video shows actors playing a Duluth couple standing in front of the Ford product chosen to represent the Zenith City — an LTD Country Squire station wagon with simulated woodgrain siding. (more…)
Ripped at Shooter’s Saloon in 2002
[Editor’s note: For this week’s essay we’ve once again pulled out a relic from the archive of Slim Goodbuzz, who served as Duluth’s “booze connoisseur” from 1999 to 2009. The Sultan of Sot visited Shooter’s Saloon, 624 Tower Ave. in Superior, and composed this article for the April 3, 2002 issue of the Ripsaw newspaper. Shooter’s went out of business circa 2009.]
Shooter’s Saloon is a really nice place. The people who work there are efficient and friendly. The drinks are reasonably priced. The room is large and there are pool tables and a video hunting game with a big orange shotgun. Every time I go to Shooter’s, a live band is performing for no cover charge. Yet, it’s still the kind of a scene a judgmental guy like me looks at and says to himself, “How can I wreck this by weaponizing my prejudice?”
See, Shooter’s is a country-western line-dancing bar, and country-western line-dancing people love to go there. This is the one, only and perfectly acceptable reason why I’m bothered by Shooter’s and want to wreck it. I want to go up to any of the ridiculous posers there and say, “Howdy pardner. Nice belt buckle. You look like Nick Bockwinkel. Is that the AWA belt or World Class? Say, I have a question for you. I was just thinking about how Halloween was five months ago, yet you are still dressed up like you’re in a gay bar in Nashville, which got me to wondering, have you ever once milked, roped or gutted anything? Have you even shot a BB gun at a beer can? I mean, come on Hoss, we’re on the boozebelt of Superior, Wis. Who are you kidding?” (more…)
Postcard from the Opening of Navigation Season
This undated postcard shows a freighter entering the Duluth Shipping Canal at some point in the early 1900s. (more…)