Having spent a fair bit of time in Ellendale over the years, I always wondered about the history of that elegant insertion in the business district, with its triple-arch facade, known as the Baldwin Building. I knew there had to be a story there.
Which there is, right under my nose, it turns out, in the Institute for Regional Studies Collections at NDSU Archives. The Baldwin Corporation records span 31.6 feet of archival shelf space. Acquired in 1960 from Baldwin heirs, that’s a lot of paper. But then, Baldwin Farms once comprised 70,000 acres in Dickey County.
Now, I haven’t gone through all those records, any more than I have gone over all those acres; probably never will; but I’ve rummaged around in them, and done some reading on the side. Two works are particularly helpful: a master’s thesis in agricultural economics done at North Dakota Agricultural College in 1924, the author of which was assistant manager of Baldwin Farms; and an article in North Dakota History by one of the founders of the Institute for Regional Studies, the historian William C. Hunter.
Although Baldwin Farms was not one of those big operations set up on Northern Pacific Railroad lands in the 1870s, it is classified as a bonanza farm, one of those that came together by the action of an investor buying up homesteads and other properties and piecing them together. That investor was an attorney and land shark in Wisconsin named George B. Baldwin Sr.
Most of what we know about bonanza farms comes from the classic work published by the institute in 1964, The Day of the Bonanza: A History of Bonanza Farming in the Red River Valley of the North, written by Hiram M. Drache and published by the institute. Hi didn’t use the Baldwin papers; he had enough to deal with researching the core bonanza farms along the railroad; for the institute holds not only the papers of J. B. Powers, the land agent who set up the bonanzas, but also those of several of the great ones.
I’m here to suggest, though, that it’s time for some scholars younger than I not only to work through those Baldwin records but also recolonize the other bonanza farm collections. Hi Drache was a lover of big agriculture and big business who was interested in bonanza farms primarily as business ventures. The perspective of his writings affects how the state historical society and other interpreters view the bonanza farms — for their business interest. I’m saying, there is more there.
My shallow dive into the Baldwin collection indicates we can learn a lot about other things that interest us today: the dynamics of the settler society on the ground, and its interactions with the land itself — things about people and soil and crops and livestock and living on the land, not just the account books.
Land investors like old man Baldwin were kind of a problem on the settlement frontier. He accumulated properties, rented them out, neglected them, and so by the time of his passing in 1907, they were a soil-exhausted, weed-infested mess. His two sons took over the land company and cleaned up operations: disposing of some lands to actual settlers, renting additional land to them, and then, north and east of Ellendale, setting up a string of what they called “ranches” but which really were model, diversified farms.
Under private auspices, the Baldwins conducted an experimental venture in how to farm the plains. This is worth another look; stay tuned.
