UND

Today is Valentine’s Day, and store windows are decorated in red and pink and the finest restaurants are booked with dinner reservations. It is a day for love, but for a certain group of young men at the University of North Dakota in 1902, it must not have been the day of love they hoped for. Just eight days later, on February 22, the ten men, who described themselves as “turned-down, heart-pierced young men,” would come together to form the Varsity Bachelor Club.

Doctor Webster Merrifield became UND’s third president on this date in 1891. Merrifield grew up in Vermont and graduated from Yale in 1877. For the next two years, he taught in a private school in New York, then spent the next four years as a Greek and Latin tutor at Yale. He moved to Dakota Territory in 1883 to fill the chair of Latin and Greek at the newly established University of North Dakota, where he also taught Literature and Political Science.

On this date in 1894, the Fargo Agricultural College football team won the inter-collegiate state championship. It beat the Grand Forks University team by a score of 24 to 4. It was not a game that was won without a bit of controversy. The object of contention involved a disputed player on each team.

On this date in 1914 the Weekly Times Record of Valley City announced on the front page that “Miss Katherine Stinson, the aviatrice” would be attending the Barnes County Fair. Miss Stinson was one of the first women in the US to earn a pilot’s certificate.