Sarah Walker

It’s not every day that one can turn back time, but it happened on this date in 1931. Two years before, in 1929, Senator William E. Martin of Morton County introduced a bill that would put all of North Dakota in the central time zone.

Mathias Hunt was born in Germany in 1848. He immigrated to America as a teenager, entered the Benedictine monastery in Indiana soon after, and became a priest by 1872. Best known as Father Jerome, he moved to Dakota Territory in 1877 and began working as a missionary at the Standing Rock Reservation. Eventually, in 1883, he traveled to the Mission of St. Michael’s on the Fort Totten Reservation.

In September of 1931, a community acting group organized in the city of Bismarck. Sixty people became members at the first meeting, where the group adopted a constitution and elected officers. It cost 50 cents per year to be a member. Their goal was to “provide drama as a means of recreation both for participants and audience.” Members determined that admission fees would be kept low, only enough to cover costs.

On this date in 1928, readers of the Flasher Tribune were reminded that there were only 15 days of Christmas shopping left. Fewer days than today, since stores were closed on Sundays back then.

On this date in 1909, the city of Williston celebrated the opening of their new Great Northern Depot. There had initially been some concern that the new depot would be farther from the city that the old depot, but the local commercial club got involved to ensure that it would be built close to the original site.

The city of Robinson, in Kidder County, experienced a news-making surprise in 1925. A public water well had begun to produce gasoline! The water had apparently turned bad for drinking a year earlier, but was still being used off-and-on for other purposes. A motorist who stopped to add water to his radiator, realized it was gasoline when he got it to burn.

North Dakota enacted prohibition within its borders upon entering as a state in 1889. Of course, many continued to illegally sell and transport liquor. In March 1915, the North Dakota legislature approved House Bill 114, which defined the crime of bootlegging and clarified the punishment for violations.

Today is Halloween, a perfect time to talk about scary stories, ghosts, and old legends! The North Dakota State Archives holds many items that speak to such things. After all, history is rife with stories of the unexplained, and North Dakota is no different.

In early 1917, social news about the State Historical Society’s second librarian, Miss Georgia Carpenter, made the columns of the Bismarck Tribune. She was engaged to Charles Hageman of Bismarck. Charles was a travelling salesman for a Duluth hardware company. The two would be marrying in Randolph, New York, from where she hailed, although they planned to make their home in Bismarck.

In the early history of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, the offices were in the basement of the original Capitol. It wasn’t a lot of space, which soon became a problem. In 1913, Secretary Orin G. Libby of the State Historical Society, reported, “the crowded condition of the museum rooms… made it impossible for the Society to enter into any considerable collecting …”