Here’s a photo of the Hamilton Hotel from the opposite perspective, presumably shot in 1970. A billboard on the side advertises Douglas M. Head’s campaign for Minnesota Governor. His running mate was Duluth Mayor Ben Boo.

The Depression was not kind to this company. It went out of business in 1933.
 

Also, here’s a photo from around that opening time.

Well, there was some coverage the next day. Cigars for the men, and ??? for the women. One store of that era gave away silver spoons. So it’s still a mystery. The “surprise event” was just giving away furniture.
 

I want to know what the souvenir and the “surprise event” was later in the evening!

From the ad:
 

According to the Duluth Herald on July 17, 1913, the airplane was also used for filming. That movie has likely been lost to time but in doing a quick search for it, I found a video made 10 years ago that was shot in part from a fully functional re...

Wow! Not much has changed on that block since 1909. Someone should probably go visit the rock and get a sense of it’s true size and material, but it does look like pretty inaccessible private property. Hmmm. I do know a bunch about those apartment...

The 1909 Sanborn map shows there actually once was a house at 714, on the same lot as the rock (and not yet a house next to the rock at 716, contradicting the St. Louis County property information). But the building was quite short and the rock wo...

It’s possible. All those houses predate aerial imagery so there is no way to know for certain. But the first house built on the block, and the only one offset from the street, is the one next to the boulder. So if the rock was not there when the f...

Nice!! Devil’s advocate here, though: could that rock be left over from the building process of that neighboring building? It looks like local rock; could they have been blasting and shaping rocks for the foundation right there? And the grass is l...

“All cities have a particular and special beverage suited to them.” — Djuna Barnes

I can see my house from here!

Ten years later, the full-set video is available.

Those are crazy, foolish, tricky, joking, and nonsensical. Thanks!

Wait, what? You can’t post an article about a barnyard dance at a ballroom without elaborating. That was a thing? I had only known that phrase as a catchy kids’ book.

‘My little cow’ is certainly the most reasonable interpretation that I have seen so far. And just from a brief review of the word ‘cow’ in the papers around that time, it was definitely an era where it was possible for a cow to become famous again.
 

Or.. lilla could also mean purple in more modern Norsk. In which case it’s My Purple Cow. I think it’s the former though, using old spelling.

Actually, maybe it’s “Milillaku” which would be My Little Cow… haha.

To me that looks like a nickname in Norwegian, starting with “mililla…” and I don’t know the last three or four letters. It would be “My little [something or other]”

Ha -- that’s nice. I certainly did enjoy being part of the group effort. But anyone coming across this later shouldn’t feel left out. There is still work to be done. Namely a single word on the postcard that looks half-legible and yet remains inde...

I only want to correct one item about winters in Duluth. They are exactly like the other three seasons, three months long. Most that locals that don’t like any winter blame the fact that we don’t have a spring on winter, thus the six month winter....

Nice to see a link to this in today’s PDD transmission. The 1869 photo of the couple with the sled dogs is one of my favorites in the Minnesota Digital Library. I’m waiting to pick up a colorized version that I’m having printed for framing. It sho...

And what, may I ask, was Magnus’ favorite color? 😉

Seriously, this is an utterly mind boggling post and series of comments! You guys should start a historical detective agency. Holmes, Poirot, even Kojak’s got nothing on you.

Who loves ya baby? ...

Those are some good concluding details. So it’s a photo of the house at 6109 Olney St. where the family that started Duluth Tent & Awning lived, taken a year before they bought the Duluth Pack design from C. Poirier.

The postcard was written by M...

And yes, if a home had a second door/apartment or was a duplex, it was often listed as two addresses in some places. If we had Sanborn map detail from that area, it would likely show the two addresses. And addresses were also sometimes fluid; I kn...

Here’s a bit more info about the Alveson Brothers (which later became Duluth Tent and Awning and later the Duluth Pack store).

It looks like Magnus was working for another business as an awning maker in 1910, and then by 1912 the Alveson Brothers...

And finally, Gina found something that ended up being a bit overlooked in the effort to pin down the exact address. The Alveson family didn’t just end up being the owners of Duluth Tent and Awning, now Duluth Pack, they were the founders. Accordin...

That all makes sense. And it clears up something else that was confusing me a bit. While 6113 Olney only appears once in the newspaper archives and is likely a mistake, 6111 Olney appears quite a few times. But the same people are often listed as ...

Also, during this searching, I found another postcard for sale that I believe is from the same photographer as the house photo … the handwriting and backing match. Some of the Alveson sisters, perhaps?

But wait! I was able to check the U.S. Census via Ancestry, and it reminded me of the folly of assuming the newspaper was correct, or in assuming we understand 1910-era housing arrangements!

In the 1910 Census, there are only two houses listed on...

I really did not believe that it was possible to come to any satisfactory resolution about who wrote that postcard to whom and from which house and yet somehow we answered all of those questions, so I’m just going to take the liberty of throwing u...

And as I soon as I posted, I saw that Gina and I were coming to the same conclusions at the same time. Although I didn’t find the Duluth Tent and Awning connection. That actually adds quite a bit of context to the photo.

And now some clarity on the address. It seems the Alveson’s owned three houses in row: 6109, 6111 and 6113. In 1927, a roof fire that involved “considerable loss” was reported at 6109 Olney. It’s likely this spread to the other two houses as well,...

In 1959, Magnus C. Alveson is listed as president of Duluth Tent and Awning Co., and lived at 4125 W. Sixth St. Earnest was the treasurer and general manager in 1959. He lived upstairs of the storefront at 1610 W. Superior St., where there is sti...

I think his name was Magnus Alveson, and he and his family (owned?) Duluth Tent and Awning. This is a clip from the 1922-1923 Duluth Directory. There is evidence in the Duluth Herald that 6109 Olney Street burned in 1927. It was an area not ever c...