The history book detailing 150 years of Moorhead schools, Once a Spud — Always a Spud, is ready to go to print. Pre-orders began this week, with finished books due in December. (Photo/Moorhead Schools)

Nancy Edmonds Hanson

Are you a genuine Spud? If you graduated from Moorhead High School within the past 150 years, you’re part of the massive new history book due to be released in December.

Pre-ordering begins this week for “Once a Spud – Always a Spud,” the encyclopedic collection of memories and memorabilia that’s been a labor of love for countless MHS grads over the past three years. Three hundred-plus oversized 12×18” pages, designed by Rick Westra and Alex Ryan of SpudsTV, are ready to go to the publisher. Handsome hard-cover histories are expected to be available in December during the last weeks of the Moorhead Area Public School System’s sesquicentennial year.

Want a copy? Pre-ordering begins this week on to the district’s 150th anniversary website: www.isd152.org/150. Copies will only be available by pre-order; the cost is $60.

Funded by the Moorhead Legacy Education Foundation, the epic history includes chapters on every decade of the school’s past. According to Brian Cole, who has shepherded the work of hundreds of volunteers who have gathered information and artifacts, each section includes a timeline, data on that period and a map or photo of Moorhead during that era. “Spud history is Moorhead history,” he says. “Even those without a direct connection to the schools will find fascinating insights into our city.”

Once a Spud’s origin goes back to Superintendent of Schools Lynne Kovash. Noting the impending 150th anniversary, she announced in 2016, “When I retire, I should write a book on the story of Moorhead schools.”

Kovash died in 2019, but her dream has lived on. Since then, current high school students and graduates long past the date on their diplomas have pitched in to share memories, loan scrapbooks for scanning, transcribe historical records into digital form for publication, and delve into historical archives to track traces of the school throughout the city’s history. 

Large among those sources are the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul, where a big share of district records were deposited 20 years ago, and, here at home, the archives of the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County. Archivist Mark Peihl, says Cole, has been particularly helpful throughout the project: “He knows everything – literally everything.”

Almost 500 students and adults have spent hours scouring every edition of the Spud, the MHS newspaper, going back to its beginning. Tens of thousands of school board minutes have been sifted. Every single graduation program has been tapped for its list of that year’s graduating class, yielding the mammoth compendium of 29,874 graduates.

Photos – nearly 3,000 of them – have come from myriad sources. The district hired a professional during the 1890s to photograph the interior of its high school … the one that preceded the Townsite Center on Eighth Street in the days before electricity. Other images were found in the hundreds of scrapbooks past grads have shared. A wealth of activity shots were contributed by sports photographers Bill and Renee Grover.

Facebook turned out to be a valuable tool in reaching out to Spuds whose glory days may have been long ago. In 2021, graduates were invited to share their notions of teachers, events and memorable moments that were essential to telling MHS history. More than 350 responded, with the vast majority of their suggestions making it onto the pages. The social media posts did more: They renewed connections between many who’d lost touch over the years, with their comments adding to the richness of the story.

“You’re going to read about people you’ve never heard of before along with many you remember well,” Cole predicts. “Moorhead is in some ways like a big small town. Your grandparents or parents, your children, your next-door neighbors, you yourself – some who have moved away, others who have stayed here for a lifetime – if they’re Spuds, they’re all part of this history.”

After all, he says, “Home is where your story is.”