531 feet above sea level??? Come on, we can do better.

Hallelujah! Thank you bringing this to light. Seems it’s easier for all these poltroon city hall employees to just flat out lie about their misguided policies and poor decision-making.
No wonder no one wants to live or stay here to raise a family.

Once the land was surveyed into townships (per the land Ordinance of 1785 that you mention above), the parcels within those townships could be platted and subdivided into neighborhoods and lots. In Duluth, sometimes developers did that on a grid, ...

Thanks Waferdog, I rephrased the post to make it clear the bridge in front of the Blatnik is a railroad bridge.

I’m a bit late to the game on this one but I just want to point out that the bridge pointed out in this post is not the old Interstate Bridge. That was on the eastern side of the Blatnik Bridge. The bridge shown here is a rail bridge.

Thanks for the shout out, David.

My manuscript is a creative narrative nonfiction story about a girl in southwest Minnesota who grows up during the Great Depression and comes of age during WWII.

For now, the Substack is a way for me to create ex...

The walleye record still stands. It was caught by LeRoy Chiovitte of Hermantown, who passed away in 2019. The family donated the fish to the Chik-Wauk Museum and Nature Center on the Gunflint Trail, about a mile from where the fish was caught.
 

Thanks for sharing! I was glad I found the right spot, but even if I had gotten the town completely wrong, it still would have been a really great trip. Everybody that I met was really friendly (I didn’t actually ask to go upstairs in the house --...

Hey man, I was just wondering, since your videos meant a lot to me. I’m just asking for two videos, so I can keep them. One is “It’s going to be a merry christmas” and the other would be “Re: You me and all the problems with the world”

There are ...

Hi! My family moved to Saint-Germain-Laval in 1837 (a bit earlier than that, actually, but I can’t pin the year down exactly, unfortunately). I just wanted to say a quick thanks for visiting the town. It sure isn’t Duluth, Minnesota, but, to me, i...

I remember that summer very clearly! The bay was crammed full of boats waiting for the strike to end. Somewhere, I have a photo that I took at the time showing all the boats.

New as of November 2024:

First Light: Carl Gawboy, Wendy Savage & the Ojibwe Art Expo
This three-part series dives into the Anishinaabeg art scene past and present with two artists who were heavily involved in the Ojibwe Art Expo. White Earth Nat...

This is most likely from around August 1979 near the end of the Twin Ports grain millers strike as the shippers were staging ships awaiting successful contract negotiations.

I was just watching that episode a few minutes ago! I can’t believe it was 70 years ago!

Unfortunately, this is not an issue of the Ripsaw that is available through the Minnesota Historical Society’s Digital Newspaper Hub. I think I grabbed the image from an eBay listing years ago when someone was selling it. So it’s not possible to r...

So what was that about, exactly?

1955 City Directory ad. They did survive! But marketing ice differently for a while.

Here is an advertisement from 1919 that ran in the Duluth Herald — clear use of the word refrigerator when they were powered by ice.
 

I should add that this online research was made possible by the addition of more years (up to early 1940s) of the Duluth Herald on the Minnesota Historical Society’s Digital Newspaper Hub. Horray for searchable text!

Wow, thanks Brian! That looks like definitely 1930s or maybe even late 1920s. The electric refrigerators were really expensive and had some dangerous chemicals so they didn’t really catch on until the 1950s. Another story goes that women were gett...

I have a little projector made in the 1930s or ’40s, by the Jam Handy company. It was a company (in Chicago, I think) that made promotional filmstrips. Inside the projector was storage for three rolled up filmstrips. One of them was selling GE ref...

Attached is a clearer photo of Shuggy from the mid 1960s. Shuggy was the 7th cousin (DNA confirmed) to Elvis Presley who was also his friend.
 

Here is a copy of his album cover from Pazazz Records. The image is Shuggy on the cover. He traveled to Hollywood several times from Texarkana Texas where he was from. He sold several of his songs, one being “Empty Arms Again” to friends like Jerr...

Shuggy Smith aka Oscar Chatfield Smith was my father. He was born in Texarkana in 1936 and died in Texarkana in 1998. Shuggy had several children (17 so far) from different mothers and we have found each other with DNA confirmation. Shuggy did rec...

Great find HBH. This was before the days of “Divided back” postcards in 1907, so she wrote her info on the front with the image.

Note in the ad above, it says they only ice their Coolerator every 4-7 days. That means a big block of ice was delivered from the Duluth ice and fuel company, which was promoting the use of these devices that needed ice. Little did they know, some...

This led me to a fascinating search for the true history of Coolerators. They were still powered by a big block of ice at least until the 1940s, as shown by this ad from the Duluth Herald from May of 1940. This is a great example of how terminolog...

That’s an ice chipper! It’s seems Coolerator refrigerators weren’t cold enough to actually freeze ice but you could order a big block of ice and it would hold for awhile in the fridge. That tool is part of the process of getting ice cubes from the...

Ice pick. Patented by William F. Arndt and John H. Ganzer as US Patent No. 2,070,773 on Feb. 16, 1937.

“This invention relates to ice picks and it has for its object to provide a simple and convenient device for removing ice cubes which have been ...

Circles.
 

She was born in 1893, so the postcard would be from 1905.

And here’s a picture of her from Ancestry.com.
 

One year later, repair work is underway.

As a proud owner of a taxidermied bust of a two-headed calf, I can say that mine looks most like Alyssa Ware’s version. My calf was stillborn, and taxidermied by a farmer that traded it for an antique from my great grandfather’s shop. The mount al...

Glad you enjoy them -- and I appreciate you taking the time to express your appreciation!

Very relaxing.