This talk will begin with a description of the original old growth forests of northern Minnesota, including the power they held in the landscape and their influence on the indigenous people. These forests attracted rapacious logging and mining at a time of extraordinary expansion in the United States, but that wasn’t the end of the […]
Musician, researcher, and Bemidji-native Brian Miller presents “Logging Era Folksong in Northern Minnesota.” Miller accompanies his singing with guitar and bouzouki (a double-stringed relative of the mandolin). He crafts rich new arrangements of traditional folk songs from the logging era including songs from the Grand Rapids area and others learned from 100-year-old recordings of lumberjack […]
Are bogs really dark, dank, mosquito-infested swamps? Naturalists know better and through Sparky Stensaas’s video and still images, we’ll explore our northern black spruce and tamarack bogs… without getting our feet wet or frozen! It takes tenacity and adaptation to live in this harsh environment. Meet the bird that grows snowshoes, the devious orchid that […]
Join us at the Forest History center for a celebration of winter, featuring outdoor games and activities including horse-drawn sleigh rides, snow snake races, tomahawk throwing, a snowshoe scavenger hunt, and of course the ever popular sliding hill. Trails will be open for skiing, snowshoeing, and biking.
Every place has its history. And the people of a place are shaped by its history. But the history they learn depends on who tells it. The Mississippi River and its tributaries in what is now Itasca County have been inhabited for millennia by people indigenous to the North American continent. Prior to settlement by […]
