Plains Folk

When the ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Bottineau proposed to convene a basket social on the Friday evening of December 28, 1887, in the new schoolhouse, the editor of the Bottineau Pioneer thought it best to explain what was going to happen. The basket social (later known as a box social, or box supper) was a new social custom in Dakota Territory.

The first box social, or basket social, in that part of Dakota Territory that became the state of North Dakota--the first such event of which I have found record, that is--took place in a Jamestown schoolhouse in the first week of February, 1883. The Weekly Alert reported, “The basket social of the Baptist congregation at the school house panned out about $65 in proceeds. Col. Daly officiated as auctioneer of the baskets each containing a square meal for two and the name of the lady who was to

It was a sort of a barbeque--although I think of a barbeque as a social event, something forbidden in the no-contact zone of this year of contagion--still, it was sort of a barbeque when we opened a bottle of New Zealand sauvignon blanc on the patio. We had a fire, over which we suspended some skewers. We dined at leisure, setting aside a hundred cares, as the sinking sun gilded the cornfields and the shelterbelts.

School term had not yet commenced, but there was a crowd late one Friday evening in August 1885 at a country schoolhouse three miles north of Drayton, North Dakota. The box social convened that night was, according to the Pembina Pioneer Express , “an unqualified success.”

The Jamestown Weekly Alert declared it the social event of the week--the basket social hosted by the ladies of the Methodist Episcopal Church, using a vacant business space as venue, in late September 1884. The hosts made the room ready and attractive and, before the arrival of guests, it was graced by “an abundance of handsomely constructed baskets well filled with the delicacies of the season from all parts of the continent,” as the Alert described them, “each basket containing supper for two

There is the granite memorial, there is the song by Chuck Suchy, and there are countless commemorations of the sacrificial death of Hazel Miner, the Oliver County farm girl who died saving her brother and sister from the killer blizzard of 15-16 March 1920. There were others who died in that storm, however.

Of all the wonderful songs written by Chuck Suchy, none is more compelling than “The Story of Hazel Miner.” It begins in lyric style, gauzy and ethereal, and suddenly, just in time, transitions into solid 4/4 and into the rhetoric of traditional balladry: Up in Oliver County On the North Dakota plains Lived a farmer’s daughter Hazel Miner was her name

The past few weeks I’ve been telling you stories about lightning rods and lightning rod men, who had a shady reputation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. At the same time, there was the emergence of respectable science affirming the protective merit of lightning rods and advising people how best to deploy them. Eventually farmers bought in, and most every farm exhibited spikes and cables. How did that happen?

The lightning rod man drove up to a farmhouse and, espying a boy outside, said to the lad, “Is that your father lying there in the shade, sonny?” “No, sir; pa’s away, an’ me and ma is the only ones to home; that’s a dead book agent. D’ye want to sell ma anything?” “Thunder, no!”, and the lightning rod man beat his retreat. That was the joke circulating in our papers in 1880, a time when farm folk were fed up with the drummers who fanned out from the liveries in town to hawk their dubious wares

On June 5, 1886, lightning struck the Washington Monument, with alarming effect. The strike induced a crack in the stone of the north face of the pyramidal structure, near the top. Site managers did two things in response.