Some students go their entire academic career without realizing that NDSU has its own archives. Located less than ten minutes from campus in an old warehouse, the building may seem unassuming at first. Once inside, however, visitors will find that the archives are filled almost floor-to-ceiling with records, photographs and historical documents that can help them succeed in their classes and learn more about the state in which they live. The archives operate as an Institute of Regional Studies archive, making it an official state repository as well as being NDSU’s official archive, meaning that a ton of information is available to anyone who needs it.
“This is what I like to call NDSU’s open secret,” said Matt Tallant, a processing archivist. One of the things he does is sort through boxes that are sent to the archives and catalogue what is in them. Right now he is working on placing NDSU’s many files into a unified numbering system for easier access. To the non-archivist, these tasks may sound boring—and Tallant admits that they sometimes are—but he has found a lot of historically interesting things doing these tasks throughout the years.
“One of the first things I worked on when I first started here was these documents from the Chaffee family, who moved here with the Amenia and Sharon Land Company,” said Tallant. “Here we see that Chaffee and his wife went down on the Titanic coming back from buying furniture in Europe, I think, and he died but his wife survived…It’s nice to know that little old Fargo in the middle of nowhere can connect to the world.”
Other standout historical documents include photographs and records from the 1893 fire that swept through Fargo, the original change-of-name forms from when Roger Maris changed his last name from Maras to Maris for ease of spelling, and documents mapping the distribution of brothels in the early 1900s.
“A while back two NDSU professors were researching prostitution, and they saw that this name, Melvina Massey, kept popping up,” said John Hallberg, another archives employee. Records show that Melvina Massey and other brothel owners were charged a monthly fine for “keeping a house of ill fame,” but they were never sent to jail or otherwise punished, indicating that the fine was more like a bribe paid to the city. Later, probate records of Massey’s home provided good examples of what a brothel would have looked like at that time. “It turns out there was actually a red-light district in downtown Fargo, located where City Hall currently sits…I guess you could say they helped pay for City Hall a long time ago.”
Hallberg also said that the inventor of the Fujita scale, Ted Fujita, used photos of the 1957 Fargo Tornado to develop his scale since locals so widely photographed the tornado. The archives now own those photos, as well as the firsthand accounts of people who lived through the tornado and wrote letters to WDAY about their experiences, and last year they did an exhibit featuring them.
The archives are also home to hundreds of thousands of pages of sheet music formerly owned by Laurence Welk, who hosted the Laurence Welk show from 1951 to 1982, kept in a climate-controlled back room with massive sliding shelves. Papers, books and photographs need to be stored in non-acidic folders and boxes and are kept around a temperature of 65 degrees and with 45 percent humidity to keep them in good condition for as long as possible. The back room holds many photographs of homes in the Fargo area when they were first built, collections of photos from throughout NDSU’s history, maps and blueprints, collections of photo negatives on paper and glass, and a collection of items owned by former State Senator Milton Young.
In the 1890s and early 1900s, Fargo became the divorce capital of the United States, as evidenced by the records brought to the archives from their less-than-ideal storage spot in the Cass County Courthouse’s bell tower. Fargo was attractive to potential divorcees since it made the divorce process so easy: those who wanted a divorce simply had to maintain residency for ninety days and submit their evidence for the divorce without jumping through the many legal hurdles there were at the time.
In the overflow section of the archives, some pieces of NDSU’s history that don’t fit in a manila folder are stored, including the first computer used at NDSU, the first digital catalog to be used in the library, and a large concrete cow’s head. The cow’s head came from the old dairy building that was torn down and was made to commemorate Golden Marguerite, the dairy cow that produced a record-breaking amount of butter fat in 1921.
Though the record was broken in 1969, Golden Marguerite’s legacy lives on, since she is supposedly buried on campus and a plaque commemorating her feats of dairy production now sits outside Shepperd Arena. “When they were digging under Sugihara Hall we asked them to keep an eye out for bones, but we never heard if they found any,” said Tallant.
Anyone can visit the archives or reach out to them to ask for help finding something relevant to their research. “I’ve even had people from Europe contact us. The last person was from Holland where there’s a sister city also named Fargo, and they were doing research on that,” said Tallant. “We’ve also had Ken Burns contact us wanting a bunch of pictures for his documentary on bison.” Archives employees are happy to help students find what they’re looking for as well, whether it is documents for a research paper or historical photos for a presentation.
Students who want to be even more immersed in the archives can volunteer to help sort and catalog materials. “I estimate that if we stopped working on new stuff now and started working only on our backlog, it would take twenty years to clear,” said Tallant. “So yes, we really need volunteers.” Those interested can email ndsu.archives@ndsu.edu or reach out to Tallant directly at matthew.tallant@ndsu.edu.