As a kid growing up in Hunter, N.D., Mark Peihl always figured Fargo-Moorhead might play a part in his future. What he couldn’t have known back then was the huge role that he would play in capturing its past.
Mark has spent the last 30 years building, preserving and cataloging the 15,555 photographs in the collection of the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. Today that archive is the promised land for local and regional historians … a broad, deep visual catalog of views of Moorhead, Hawley and other communities dating from the very earliest days of settlement.
But his path to a position that perfectly suits him was a circuitous one.
“When I graduated from the University of North Dakota with my degree in history, I couldn’t find what I was looking for in St. Paul or Bismarck,” he says, speaking of the state historical societies there. His studies in journalism, too, seemed less than promising: “I figured out that, at best, I’d end of writing obits for the Bagley Bugle.”
Instead, the 1978 grad found himself armed and employed by an armored car company. “I spent seven years in an unheated, un-air-conditioned armored box full of bags of cash – big, big bags,” he remembers. “If they’d broken loose, they’d have crushed me like a grape.”
Meanwhile, though, he kept an eye on who actually got the history-related jobs to which he aspired. He noted they generally came from the ranks of interns and volunteers. “The Clay County historical society folks seemed like a good bunch. I finagled a route with the armored-car company that allowed me to have Thursday afternoons off … and I volunteered.”
That evolved into the career that’s captivated him ever since. Mark went to work in the historical society’s first quarters in Moorhead’s Great Northern Railway depot, since demolished. He was assigned to catalog a collection of glass plate negatives from pioneer Moorhead photographer Ole E. Flaten and Hawley’s S.P. Wange, most still in their original paper sleeves. “My job was to clean them, transcribe whatever information was available, transfer them to acid-free sleeves, and devise a numbering system,” the archivist says.
How many?“There are 15,555,” he says. “I know. I counted them.”
The Flaten and Wange collections are both heavy on family and personal portraits, but also include street scenes and business images. Many are featured in the HCSCC’s current major exhibit at the Hjemkomst Center, “Wet and Dry – Alcohol in Clay County 1871-1937.”
The local photo trove is especially important, he explains, because of the rarity of finding such troves of photographic negatives. “When professional photographers retired, they generally sell their negatives for their silver content,” Mark explains.
When Flaten – Moorhead’s only resident studio pro — retired in 1929 after 50 years in the business, he sold his business to a cousin named Oyloe. That included his extensive negative files – he’d told a newspaper reporter in 1914 that he had 129,000. Oyloe peddled them to a company that reclaimed their miniscule silver content for a pittance.
Oyloe eventually sold the business to the Grosz family. They found about 800 left in the studio that he’d apparently overlooked and donated them to the historical group in 1960. Mark urges, “If you find that kind of thing, don’t throw it away!”
The Wange collection, dating from 1892 through 1940, was acquired by a similarly undignified route. When the Hawley photographer moved out of his studio, he abandoned his life’s work in the form of negatives in his attic downtown. Attorney Magnus Wefald uncovered the 12,000 studio portraits and scenes of town and rural life when he bought the property.
Mark’s archives include other priceless images. He prizes HCSCC’s “carte de visites,” or photo calling cards, created by photographer William H. Davy, created when the namesake of Davy Park and his business partner Caswell documented Moorhead in 1871-1872. Northern Pacific Railroad photographer F.J. Haynes photographed the city from 1877 to 1879 before moving on to Fargo, Minneapolis and ultimately Montana. Clay County has about 50 of his prints.
As photography developed and became more commonplace, much of the evidence of the last half of the 20th century has been taken for granted and slipped away. “The switch to color photography created some challenges,” he notes. “Color film and photos are not particularly stable.” More recent decades are represented in part from donated archives of Ham Gillespie and John Hest – again, what remains of film negatives recycled for silver. He has collected significant photos from The Forum and the Hawley Herald, as well as the Red River Scene. Another box of 4×5 transparencies dates from the 1960s and 1970s, when WDAY-TV used them in producing television ads. “A gentleman found the whole box in a dumpster,” Mark reports.
It’s not a comprehensive collection by any means. “We’ve got what we’ve got,” he shrugs.
As photography becomes more and more ubiquitous – like the countless millions of digital images being snapped by today – he fears a historical resource may be lost to future historians. Changing technology presents huge issues; while disks may be preserved, will there be equipment to read them?
But the biggest challenge of all may be recognizing their value in preserving the history they document.
“Over Thanksgiving in 1983, my mother and father sat down with his boxes of family photos,” Mark muses. “They spent daysgoing through them. Mom heard stories she’d never known over 40 years of their marriage.
“Dad had a series of strokes in January 1984. If they hadn’t taken that time to sort and label his photos, they’d have been lost forever.” He adds that his mother used a Magic Marker … not the best choice. “Record the information with the softest lead pencil you can find, like a 6B or 8B,” he advises. “But even if you have to use a crayon, write it down!”
Over 30 years, Mark has developed the most vast and detailed knowledge of Moorhead and its environs of anyone alive – much of it gleaned from close study of those photographs. He reflects that the depth of his insight, like much of his career, has come as a surprise. “I had no idea how this was going to work out,” he admits. “I don’t even know how any given day will go. I come in with some idea of what I’m going to do. But then someone comes in for help researching a really interesting question … and we’re off!
“The people I work with share my passion for local history. You really need that,” he says. “We’re repaid with a tremendous amount of psychic income, which is good, since the monetary kind is kind of scarce.
“You’ve got to have that fire in the belly. There are a lot of really, really, really good stories here waiting to be told.”
