Finally I found it, this song people were telling me about; found it in the Alfred G. Arvold Collection of the Institute for Regional Studies, at NDSU. The song, written by an NDSU graduate, James Golseth, is “Lilac Days,” an ode to spring, and beauty. Maybe also to hope, and persistence.
Because the copyright date of “Lilac Days” is 1939. On the back of the musical score is this legend, penned by Arvold.
Eighty Miles of Lilacs
In the Red River Valley . . . May Days are Lilac Days. It is planting time for all who live along the roadside. A colorful chain of varied lavenders and purples will someday connect two enterprising cities. [He’s talking about Fargo and Grand Forks.] Eighty miles of lilacs will greet the eye as one travels north and south. Every year country and city folks will crown their Lilac Queen with pomp and parade and pageantry. The children young and old will sing - “Lilac Days, Lilac Days, we welcome you / Lilac Days, Lilac Days, bring spring anew.”
In song and story Lilac Days will mean much to the people of the prairies. The lilac will beautify the highway. It will add color to our lives. It will make the countryside attractive to everybody.
You have to understand that Alfred Arvold, founder of the Little Country Theatre at North Dakota Agricultural College, was North Dakota’s greatest exponent of the early twentieth century emergence of known as the Country Life Movement. Along with the movement’s founding apostle, Liberty Hyde Bailey of Cornell, Arvold and the country lifers sought to make rural life more pleasant and rewarding, so that family farming, and agricultural abundance, would be ensured.
You can see Arvold’s problem in the 1930s, the decade of depression and dust. Lilacs were the answer, he said, eighty miles of them planted in a roadside cordon connecting the two cities of the Red River valley. Plant more of them every spring, until the job is done. Not only that, theater, and art, and beauty, and community were remedies to sustain life in the worst of times. So the second week of May, 1933, Arvold’s students selected Frances Wheeler of Fargo the first Lilac Queen of NDAC and cast her in the lead for a pageant, Lilac Days in North Dakota, they had written themselves. They sang the Lilac Song that was later published, they planted lilacs, the Gold Star Band played, and Old Main was transformed into a castle bedecked with five thousand paper lilacs.
So it went each year, with additional activities on campus, parades and floats with horseback escorts, and more important, outreach by auto caravan to additional towns. In 1938 the queen and her “lilac maidens” attended lilac plantings and a community banquet in the town of Gardner, which embraced the purple vision of Arvold. So did Grandin and Hillsboro in subsequent years, and in 1941 Governor John Moses declared 13 to 31 May Lilac Days and urged citizens to beautify roadsides statewide with lilacs.
And that was about it. Lilac Days limped along as a local festival through 1943, then disappeared. The Great Depression didn’t kill the festival; the war did. Gas rationing, a shortage of male students to play pageant parts, a general diversion to higher-priority activities. If not for the exigencies of wartime, might Lilac Days have lived on, to beautify and perfume our lives still today? I like to think so.
