6/30/2010:
On this date in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act, banning the use of harmful additives or preservatives in food or medicines. North Dakota had such a law three years earlier, in 1903. Both laws authorized inspectors to investigate and ensure that businesses were not putting impure additives into food and that they were making food under healthy conditions.
In Grand Forks, Mrs. Ella Sprague worked to clean up restaurants and stores as the "first woman Pure Food Inspector in the United States." From 1910 to 1926, Ella Sprague visited every grocery, bakery, creamery, factory, meat market or any place where food was "offered for sale, stored, or manufactured."
She made sure Grand Forks grocers put screens on their windows to protect unwrapped food "from flies, dust, dirt, and mice." She looked to see that bread and meat was cleanly wrapped and guarded from contamination. Ella also inspected slaughterhouses to ensure cleanliness; she required bakers to clean their floors and counters.
As a writer for American City Magazine reported, Sprague was "kind, tactful, firm" with investigatory powers of "Sherlock Holmes quality." She saw to it that concessions at the county fair were clean and unadulterated. When she found that a lemonade stand was using an acid powder known as "lemon-glass," she made them start using "lemons, sugar and pure water" instead. When she discovered that three concessions were using "ice taken from below the sewer" on the Red River, Ella Sprague confronted them, and they destroyed it and bought good ice.
Ella also sent food samples to the NDSU laboratories for analysis. In 1911, she sent packets of white rice to the lab. Officials found that the rice had been "polished with a coating of glucose and talcum to raise it a grade and make it appear better than it really was." Because the coating was "known to cause a skin disease," the state made the sale of such polished rice illegal so that anyone "selling anything but unpolished rice" would "be prosecuted."
Pure Food Inspector Ella Sprague was so zealous in her work in Grand Forks that she even tried to clean up businesses in East Grand Forks, even though they were located in Minnesota. Mrs. Sprague became well known and earned a listing in the 1914 Woman's Who's Who of America as the "first pure food inspector for [the] city of Grand Forks," as well as the "first woman to hold the office of State Pure Food Inspector in the U.S."
Born in Iowa in 1861, and married in 1878; she and her husband moved to Grand Forks in 1879. She died in 1948, at the age of 87, having lived a long life, no doubt due to her quest for pure food and her concern for the good health of all. Today we remember Ella Sprague, as one of North Dakota's purest food inspectors.
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck, MSUM History Department.
Sources:
"Accomplished By a Woman," Crookston Times, March 23, 1912, p. 9.
"Pioneer Woman Dies Here," Grand Forks Herald, May 13, 1948, p. 5.
"Ella M. Sprague," W.P.A. Pioneer Biographies, Orin G. Libby Collection 1119, Roll 10, Grand Forks County, Data Supplement, p. 3.
"Ella M. Sprague," in John William Leonard, Woman's Who's Who of America: A Biographical Dictionary of Contemporary Women of the U.S. and Canada, 1914-1915 (N.Y.: American Commonwealth Co., 1914), p. 771.
"North Dakota Has a Pure Food Law," Bismarck Daily Tribune, March 12, 1903, p. 2.
Katherine G. Leonard, "The Pure Food Victory Won by the Women of Grand Forks," The American City, vol. VIII, (January-June 1913), 600-603.
"Women's Clubs Claim Credit For Passage of Pure Food Laws," Bismarck Tribune, April 19, 1927, p. 1.
"The New Woman Inspector of Grand Forks," The Valley View [East Grand Forks, MN], August 26, 1910, p. 4.
Editorial, The Valley View [East Grand Forks, MN], September 2, 1910, p. 4.