The drive over to Red Lake Falls from LaSalle Lake on Sunday was beautiful with interesting changes in topography as we moved west. The terrain around Bemidji and LaSalle Lake is rolling hills. About 40 miles west of Bemidji, halfway to Red Lake Falls, the terrain abruptly becomes pancake-flat except right around the rivers.
A large Red Lake Falls farm and flat land
Red Lake Falls itself has rolling land around the Clearwater and Red Lake rivers which converge in the town. RLF is technically a city, having declared itself one in the 1880's when its population was increasing (and would be 1,800 within a decade). However, with the population now having stabilized around 1,400 people it's a city in name only. It's only 25 minutes from Crookston, county seat of the neighboring county, where a small Walmart can be found along with an assortment of other stores. RLF has a small grocery store, a Chevy dealer, a tiny weekly newspaper and not much else. We now know 12 people in town and found that everyone loves the place and wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
They even have a Washington Post writer and his family who moved from Baltimore last year to enjoy the slower pace and better quality of life after he wrote an article about the worst places to live in the U.S. and included Red Lake Falls as number 3000. He was given such a hard time about it by one of our campground's owners he came up to see it for himself and decided to move. His wife still isn't too crazy about the winters (which regularly have temps of 20 below and sometimes 40 below) but she's immersed herself in the life of the town and loves it.
The family of three siblings and their father (now retired) who own the campground where we've stayed, both this year and in 2015, is really wonderful. They're the nicest people we've ever met in our many miles of traveling. We have a special family history connection to the town which probably made us stand out to the Brumwells the first time we were here but, in spite of seeing hundreds of new people a year in their campground and tubing business, they remembered us and welcomed us like family. They are huge fans of NC and NCAA basketball, even making the 1700+ mile trip to NC, SC and GA for the NCAA tournament a few years ago.
Sunset on the Red Lake River at Voyageur's View Campground
We had a very productive week going through about 26 years of issues of the weekly Red Lake Falls Gazette. I found a lot of helpful things in the "City Briefs" which was the social media of the day. Lots of the entries were comical...."L.E. Healy returned from Minneapolis where he transacted business....Mrs. Patnaude and her daughter were at Thief River Falls between trains....Mr. and Mrs. E. Buse motored to Erskine to visit friends....Mrs. Cyr was in Crookston for medical treatment....if anyone has pigs that aren't theirs please notify the Gazette...." Apparently nothing was too small to be mentioned, and you certainly couldn't get away with having an operation without the whole town knowing about it. The Gazette has always been a weekly paper so it usually didn't cover much national news, although it did manage to report the deaths of Presidents and the sinking of the Lusitania. Much of the front page news was about farm accidents, suicides, murders and car wrecks with cars turning turtle on top of their drivers.
Red Lake Falls downtown blocks
The blocks on the left in the picture, now covered by the Chevy dealer and the bank further down, used to be a row of buildings which included the saloon owned by my grandfather and his brother up until Prohibition put them out of business....I should say out of legal business. There is no doubt in my mind that their subsequent business was bootlegging at which they probably made a lot more money than they ever did in the saloon. After searching for anything to confirm this theory it occurred to me that there's no written record of it because they never got caught. I've talked to enough people in this town about the Prohibition era to be convinced that's what happened. There was another bootlegger in town who had close connections to Al Capone so the area was probably a bootlegging center.
Red Lake County Courthouse, built in 1910
The courthouse is a striking building, absolutely the most imposing one in town. Actually, it's the only imposing one. The hill it sits on is one of the first hills going down to the Clearwater River. No one uses the front door and all those steps....parking is on the side and back.
Wikipedia says the last significant historic event in town was in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh and his future wife landed his plane at the airport here after a barnstorming trip around the Midwest. They failed to mention that his sister was a long-time resident of the town and so he visited here a number of times.
We did a lot of digging in the courthouse records and, with the help of the very nice vital records clerk, found the house my grandparents owned from at least 1907 through 1946. (I haven't been able to find the date they either bought or built the house yet but I'm working on it.) I went to the house and met the people who have owned it for the last 55 years, a delightful couple who were thrilled to see the old photos from 1907, 1914 and 1941.
House in 1914 with my grandparents in the center
House today looking very different without the wrap-around porch
There were many other things I wanted to find in the old deed books but I ran out of time. I could easily have used another week there but didn't realize how much there was to do when I set up our travel schedule. It didn't occur to me to check land records until we were already there and couldn't extend our visit.
Red Lake River at Voyageur's View Campground
Today we had a lovely drive 190 miles south to Camp Ripley which is on the Mississippi River seven miles north of Little Falls. It's the biggest National Guard Camp we've ever been on and has a very nice campground.
Impressive main gate at Camp Ripley
Tomorrow we'll check out Little Falls.
No comments:
Post a Comment