Courtesy of the New York Public Library and Google Books, detailed Duluth School Board annual reports from 125 years ago are available online to geek out on.
Links:
Report of the Board of Education of the City of Duluth, Minnesota (1891 to 1894)
Report of the Board of Education of the City of Duluth, Minnesota (1895 to 1901)
This undated postcard, printed by Brown & Bigelow of St. Paul, depicts the Spalding Hotel in Downtown Duluth. The back of the card notes the Spalding was “Duluth’s Popular Rendezvous” and offered a coffee shop, cocktail lounge and bar.
The Spalding opened at 428 W. Superior St. on June 6, 1889 and was demolished on Sept. 25, 1963.
This photo is dated Jan. 5, 1980 — 40 years ago today. It shows the Soo Line Port Switcher 2118, one of two switchers honoring the Twin Ports cities of Duluth and Superior.
Stitched together above to produced a jagged panorama are three photos by William Henry Jackson of Downtown Duluth shot just uphill from a gravel road we presume is an early version of what we call Skyline Parkway today. Below are the isolated images, which show greater detail.
From the Jan. 1, 1910 issue of the Duluth Evening Herald.
This Christmas card from Duluth jeweler Andrew Jackson promotes a special holiday sale 130 years ago, featuring “greatly reduced prices.”
A recurring source of confusion in the Mystery Photo series is whether particular images that share the stamp of the Post Card Shop in Minneapolis and the Penny Arcade in Duluth were shot in Minneapolis or Duluth. Here is another such image.
This postcard features a drawing of Duluth, Superior and the St. Louis River, and was copyrighted by Thomas W. Wahl of Wahl Realty Co. in 1908.
Thank you, distinguished citizens, for conferring upon me this office of Snow-Fort City Mayor. It is no small honor to assume my half-imaginary duties in this pop-up, collaborative, city-planning art fantasy at the edge of Lake Superior. “City” is an aspirational term for this arrangement of snow walls and monuments in Duluth’s Leif Erickson Park. Snow-Fort City’s true location lies somewhere within our skulls — like all cities. My Facebook post initiating construction was shared more than a hundred times in just a few hours, and it attracted the Duluth News-Tribune and KBJR-6/CBS-3, which tells me the vision of the snow-fort city is the real object. Almost none of the post-sharers, newspaper readers, or TV viewers made it down to the actual Snow-Fort City. They are content to view it with their eyes closed, in its most pure form: the Platonic one.
It literally came to me in a vision, like the origin of so many great cities. In a way, like Duluth itself. I remember the words of George Nettleton’s wife from 1856, when her husband’s mind swam with dreams of Duluth-as-future-city: “I thought he had a pretty long head to see that there was going to be a city here sometime when there was then nothing” (Duluth: An Illustrated History of the Zenith City by Glenn N. Sandvik).
