Listening to Willie Nelson close out the show at FarmAid this year, I am transported back to a night in 1980. My friend Liz and I are on a late September road trip in the northeast that will take us through upstate New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, then down the coast to Boston before heading home to Minnesota. We are in rural Vermont, where the owner of a woodworking shop has offered to let us camp on the front lawn of his shop when it closes for the day. We go to town for dinner, then return to the darkened lot just as a full moon is rising. As we set up our tent, music from the cassette deck plays through the car’s open windows: Willie Nelson singing Moonlight in Vermont.
We still talk about that trip: the hikes we took, the places we explored. How we went after the predicted color season but hit the peak anyway, continuing to exclaim at the new view around every curve. How the creepy guy we heard walking through an empty campground at night turned out to be earthworms crunching in the dried leaves. How Liz wanted to stop for historical markers and I wanted to stop for antiques. We were both in our 20s and already drawn to the past.
I’m now more likely to seek out historical markers than I was, although I confess to being a little guarded as I approach them. They represent someone’s idea of what is (and isn’t, by its absence) worthy of note; someone’s idea of what will have sufficient enduring significance to society that merits its being etched in stone or bronze. Historical societies that consider applications for these markers require careful documentation of research sources to support proposed text. But there are many ways to tell the same story, and many different stories that could be told about the same event, even with a shared set of facts.
Despite my reticence, I’ve come to realize that historical markers aren’t only about the events of the past. They invite the public to better understand the present. We aren’t meant to walk away after reading the text of a marker saying, “Okay, got it.” It’s the opening salvo of a dialogue. We are meant to walk away challenged by new questions. And the markers closer to home may be as intriguing—even more so—than those encountered when traveling farther afield.
Case in point.
It is last summer. Traffic flows on highway 169 in Mille Lacs County, MN, past a marker for the ghost town of Brickton between the present day communities of Princeton and Long Siding. An old black lab with white whiskers from a neighboring farm comes down the driveway to greet those who stop to read it. The bronze plaque tells of the 400 people who lived in Brickton between 1889 and 1929, when as many as 20 million bricks were made annually in the brickyards here from a local vein of clay, feeding a building boom throughout the Midwest. That’s 47 trainloads, 40 cars each, leaving this site between the months of April and October every year. The Princeton railroad depot—now the public library—is made out of this distinctive cream-colored brick. Horses that worked the brickyards in the summer were moved to logging operations in the winter. No rest for the noble.
As I leave the site, I am curious about the origin of all that clay, how it came to be here. I reach out to Tony Runkel, lead geologist at the Minnesota Geological Survey, who kindly refers me to Al Knaeble. Knaeble is a quaternary (glacial) geologist, recently retired from the Survey, who has done extensive mapping of nearby counties. He fills in some missing pieces.
Knaeble points to three published articles: “Clays and shales of Minnesota” by Frank Grout; “Glacial Lakes of the Stacy Basin, East-Central Minnesota and Northwest Wisconsin,” by Gary Meyer; and “Glacial Lake Grantsburg: A Short-Lived Lake Recording the Advance and Retreat of the Grantsburg Sublobe,” by Mark Johnson and Chris Hemstad. Based on these, he suspects that the Brickton clay pits originated as deposits of Glacial Lake Grantsburg. “The 20-25 feet of clays described by Grout in Mille Lacs County at the Brickton site are calcareous, brown and gray,” says Knaeble. “This description is typical of the majority of the Glacial Lake Grantsburg clay deposits we found in the surrounding counties. The other 3 glacial lakes that formed prior to and after Glacial Lake Grantsburg appear to have different colors or sediment compositions. The Brickton clay pit site location (also) appears to be too far north to be sediment of any of the other glacial lakes, except for Glacial Lake Grantsburg.”
Glacial Lake Grantsburg, he says, extended across a tier of counties north of today’s Twin Cities, from the Mississippi River in St. Cloud to near the St. Croix River. It is estimated to have existed for least 100 years, based on the counting the number of “varves,” not unlike counting rings on trees to ascertain their age. Aging a water body by varves is made possible by the layering of different types of sediment deposits on the lakebed under different conditions: fine grains of silt and clay when the ice freezes in winter, as contrasted with coarser sediments deposited in summer (ice-off) seasons by flowing glacial streams. It is not an easy or straightforward task to tally varves to estimate how long a glacial lake existed; they are found in many positions and locations scattered across the landscape, and may range from ½ inch to ½ foot thick.
For Knaeble, the gray/yellow colored material of the Brickton brick is a tip-off to its origins, likely carried to the area within the the Des Moines ice lobe down the Red River Valley from Canada, 10-12,000 years ago. This lobe was characterized by shale and calcium carbonate (limestone), which is yellow when oxidized.
This particular historic marker turned out to be the entrance to a rabbit hole leading much farther back in time than the 1889-1929 span on the bronze plaque, with a much larger geographic reach than the ghost town of Brickton. The foundation for the achievements of the brick makers was literally laid down thousands of years before the first brick was made, by forces they did not control. This was not the story told on the marker, but the marker led me to the story.
Does it matter if the people of Princeton know this history when they walk into their beautiful brick library along the Rum River? I don’t know. It mattered to me. The experience of being in this place became richer, more interesting, with this context.
One more.
Just last week, I once again find myself driving on Highway 169 in Mille Lacs County. I am farther north this time, near where the Rum River first begins its run out of Mille Lacs Lake: the big lake’s sole outlet. Migrating bluebirds perch on the road signs. A sign for an historical marker whizzes past. Dang. I’m hooked. I turn around, loop back to Utopia Road, where the stone marker stands in a little pull-out. The western shore of Lake Mille Lacs lies just out of sight beyond the trees.
At the top of the marker is one word, IZATYS. The text reads: “In this vicinity stood the great Sioux village of ‘Izatys’ where Duluth planted the French arms on July 2, 1679. The settlement was visited by Father Hennepin in 1680. About 1750 the Chippewa, moving westward from Lake Superior, captured the village, and by this decisive battle drove the Sioux permanently into southern Minnesota.”
It is hard to overstate the level of my ignorance when faced with this text. I lack the knowledge to judge the extent to which the information, as presented, conveys what really happened here. Still, standing in the warm afternoon sunlight of a September afternoon with my feet on the land where these scenes purportedly unfolded increases the impact of the marker’s text by many orders of magnitude. Was it a day such as this when a Frenchman stood among the people living in this great village and presumed his right to plant the arms on behalf of a country over 4000 miles away?
I later learn that “Duluth” refers to Daniel Greysolon, also known as Sieur d Lhut, and that “planting the arms” was a symbolic act to claim the territory for King Louis XIV. (Which, in this instance, didn’t turn out as Dan might have hoped). I learn that the lake is known to the Eastern Dakota—for whom it was their ancestral home—as Mde Wakan, and to the Ojibwe as Misi-zaaga’iganing. I learn that archeological investigations using radio-carbon dating have documented human habitation here to the Late Paleoindian Tradition, roughly 10,000 years ago, when the lake was newly formed from melting wastewater from the Superior lobe of the last glaciation.
I continue down the rabbit hole, and find that this historic marker was built in 1952 by the Minnesota Department of Highways. So its text—and the choice to feature an image of Greysolon—dates from that era. The marker is located on what is now the Mille Lacs Reservation of the Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe, who did not inform its content. How does the contemporary Ojibwe tribal community view its characterization of events? I contact the Mille Lacs Band Tribal Historic Preservation Office to ask. Luther Sams responds with “Boozhoo, and thank you for the interest.” He says he will look into it and get input from sources within the tribe. There are no quick answers here, but I will welcome whatever perspective he is able to share when the time comes.
When I left the IZATYS marker that day, instead of heading west back to Highway 169, I continued down Utopia Road because—well, who wouldn’t? I rounded a bend, and within minutes, came upon the rolling landscape of a cemetery. Empty benches waited in the shade under spreading oak trees. A pileated woodpecker flew off as I opened the car door and stood at the side of the road. Some burial sites were marked by polished granite stone, others with simple planks of weathered wood. Still others were topped with small, beautifully crafted structures with shingled rooftops and a small opening on one side: an Ojibwe tradition practiced by some tribal communities in northern Minnesota, Wisconsin, southeastern Manitoba, and northwestern Ontario, whose purpose is not mine to relate. Out of respect, I did not linger. This history was both too recent and too personal. But the quiet cemetery along the lake held its own kind of timeless significance. In this place, it no longer felt worthwhile to distinguish a line between past and present, between love and loss, between sky and water.
I realize that that was one of the things that had been missing from the IZATYS marker, some mention of loss, or at least acknowledgement of what the arrival of “Duluth” and others like him had meant for the people who lived along the shores of Mille Lacs in the years following 1679. Even so, the marker had served a purpose, offering a view of historical events whose veracity I am now free to interrogate, setting me to the task of addressing my own ignorance. It also, quite literally, led to my stopping at a place I never would have stopped, and even to revisit the concept of “utopia,” defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as, “a perfect society in which people work well with each other and are happy.” It seems such a reach in the times we’re now living through, but then, it always has been. It doesn’t mean it isn’t worth working toward.
So Liz, you win. Next time, we read them all. We’ll talk about what the historical markers say and what they might have said instead. If someone takes them down before we get there, we’ll take it upon ourselves to find out what happened in the country through which we pass. We’ll still ooh and aah at the colorful leaves, and Willie’s music will be one of those things that will endure. Although maybe not on cassette.
