Minnesota

Introduction

A Full-Length Portrait of the North Star State

When the Minnesota unit of the Federal Writers’ Project began work in November 1935, its members pictured a single, manageable volume. What met them instead was a commonwealth of some eighty-four thousand square miles whose interests proved as varied as its topography, and the facts arrived—as State Director Mabel S. Ulrich later admitted—in an avalanche that no one cover could hold. Even after every detail had been weighed and tested, enough remained to fill a series rather than one book. The weeding was long and often painful: communities that deserved a chapter were pressed into a handful of lines, and local pride, however justified, had to be sternly held in check.

Ulrich offered the result in a spirit of frank humility, conceding that the finished guide fell short of the book first imagined. Yet she allowed that it had merit, and credited the generous cooperation that came from every side—the University of Minnesota, whose department heads read manuscripts and served as a court of last appeal; the Minnesota Historical Society, which opened its records; the State Department of Education; and the many volunteers who mailed in local stories and photographs. If Dr. Folwell had needed four large volumes for the history of Minnesota, the Project still had to tell that story, fairly, in a single essay.

The state that emerges is one of dramatic transformation. Writing for the Minnesota State Relief Agency, administrator Herman J. Aufderheide described a book that carries the reader from the long-forgotten English fur traders, the French coureurs de bois, and the warring tribes of the borderland to a complex modern present in which great industries and cooperatives had crowded out the last traces of the frontier. Those changes had reshaped the physical face of the state, and the guide set out to show how best to see them—by canoe, by automobile, and on foot—and how best to understand what they meant.

The volume is built in four parts. Essays on the natural setting, the first Americans, the historical survey, agriculture, immigration, industry, education, the press, sport, and the arts make up the general background. A second part walks the streets of the Twin Cities, Duluth, St. Cloud, Winona, and Rochester. Twenty numbered motor tours then thread the prairie towns, the iron ranges, and the northern forests, before fifteen canoe routes carry the traveler into the Superior National Forest—the lake-laced border country of the Gunflint, Ely, and Tower areas that gives the state its claim to “ten thousand lakes.”

Issued by The Viking Press in 1938 and sponsored by the Executive Council of the State of Minnesota, the guide remains a remarkable composite portrait, drawn by many hands during the Depression years. The pages reproduced here preserve that record exactly as the Writers’ Project left it, from the foreword and preface through the full table of contents.