Nancy Edmonds Hanson

If there’s anything that people talk about more than our weather, it’s food. Beginning Feb. 11, visitors to the Historical and Cultural Society’s next major exhibit will get a taste of just what locals have been putting on their tables over the past 150 years, when the tales the staff has cooked up — “Land to Table: Food Stories from Clay County” – debuts in the Fourth Floor Gallery of the Hjemkomst Center.
“Everyone loves to talk about food,” archivist Petra Gunderson-Leith points out. “People really attach themselves to what they eat. It touches every aspect of our lives. We’re exploring it from five different aspects: cultural influences, historical heritage, the livelihoods of people who raise and sell it, healthfulness, and current trends in both food and agriculture.
The major exhibit replaces “Ihdago Manipi,” an exploration of the early years of Clay County from the days of the Dakota, Ojibwe and Metis through settlement days. It has been the main attraction at the historical museum since September 2021, closing last month.
Staff members are preparing to serve up intertwined glimpses of the area’s tastes and trends. “Food is a really massive topic,” Petra admits. “The staff has basically been concocting this topic ever since the previous exhibit opened to the public. It allows us to explore all kinds of things that are at the core of the people who have lived here, from Norwegian lutefisk and German beer to Lakota wojapi and Kurdish baklava.”
Expect to savor several classic Clay County enterprises. Levi Magnuson, HCSCC’s communication specialist, mentions Norwegian Maid, the lefse factory operated by Ulen area farmers Cora and Charles Waller from 1959 to 1963. Their story is told in photographs and artifacts from the era, including the distinctive rolling pins now in the HCSCC collection.
Then there are the grocers. A vignette traces the growing sophistication of the food business from general dry-goods stores in pioneer days to the introduction of supermarkets. It features Red Owl, which dominated the local market from 1941 through the 1980s, and Hornbacher’s, opened by Ted Hornbacher in downtown Moorhead in 1951.
Green Leaf Nursery and Produce of Glyndon comes in for its share attention. Established by Edna and Charles Annis in the 1950s, it’s now operated by son Mark Ennis and his family. “It’s an example of the farmers market trend that goes way back and is still popular today,” Petra says. “The exhibit goes back to its roots, how it came to be. It’s always been a thing.”
Program director Markus Krueger has led production of the display showcasing the region’s historical taste for beer. Tracing brewing all the way back to Moorhead’s first decades, the display tracks the homegrown ingredients that go into it, like hops – the unfamiliar yet essential ingredient used in the mash that ferments into the sudsy beverage.
An unexpected side trip goes into the story of school lunches. School lunches are relatively modern, Petra says: “In the early days, kids might bring a potato from home to roast on the wood stove in the classroom. My grandmother talked about bringing lard sandwiches to school.”
Magnuson says the exhibition doesn’t overlook the farms that provided the raw materials for generations of meals. Ag-related photos and artifacts shed light on the evolution of modern farms. In the earliest federal crop census of 1910, wheat was king among the county’s 500,000 tilled acres, accounting for 112,000 of the 120,000 bushels harvested for all crops. Potatoes, at 20,000 bushels, were a weak second.
Evolving over the decades, the 2022 ag census identifies soybeans and corn (neither given even a passing thought in 1910) as the top two crops, at 35% and 26% of the total. Wheat comes in at 12% and sugar beets, 7%. Potatoes make up less than half of 1% of the recent harvest.
Then there are long-lived community celebrations in which favorite foods are a main ingredient. Petra mentions several contemporary events like Barnesville’s Potato Days, initiated in the 1930s, and the Clay County Fair, born in the 1870s as an agricultural event, then resurrected in 1914 in its current form. “The St. Elizabeth’s Church spaghetti feed grew out of the Festival of Monte Carmelo, begun in 1912,” she says. “It lasted in that form into the 1940s in Dilworth’s Little Italy. St. Elizabeth has carried on that tradition.” Today, Pangea – sponsored by Cultural Diversity Resources and the HCSCC itself – continues to bring ethnic foods into the limelight along with the multiple cultures that treasure them.
At the heart of the exhibition is a real-life kitchen table, she and Levi explain, piled with cookbooks and recipes from the historical society’s collection. Among the food formulas that visitors will peruse are lefse and spaghetti, of course. But others are less readily recognized, like Muskoda (pronounced “muss-kody”) Pie. Popular in the 1950s, the dessert named for a ghost town near Hawley. “Its ingredients include marshmallows, chocolate, walnuts and maraschino cherries, all in a graham cracker crust,” Petra reveals. Yes, she couldn’t resist trying it herself. Her review? “Very, very, very sweet.”
“Land to Table” will be kicked off with a free opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 11, while the new Global Market takes place on the first floor of the Hjemkomst Center. The HCSCC exhibit will continue through the end of 2027.