minnesota – Page 2 – The Infomercantile

4H in Downtown Moorhead, Minnesota, 1961

This photo was taken, looking west, down Center Avenue in Moorhead Minnesota, in 1961. These floats, all from 4Hers around Clay County, were on their way to the 4H Roundup in town. Much of what’s seen here is still around, despite the flurry of Urban Renewal a few years later (most of that happened just off to the right of the photo) — in the distance, that tall sign is the FM Hotel, now an office building; the sign now has the US Bank logo. That building in the foreground, with the Anderson Pontiac sign, and the building next to it, are still around, but I’m not sure what’s occupying them now.

My great-uncle (not the guy in the picture) had a Kaiser Frazer — he owned it until he needed to clear out his farmstead, at which time the Frazer moved out to my uncle’s farm, where it has sat for almost twenty years now, progressively and slowly turning into a pile of rusty dust. Kaiser wasn’t a big manufacturer, and there weren’t a lot around, so I was rather surprised to turn up a whole bunch of pictures of another Kaiser taken within twenty miles of where my great-uncle lived. How’d that happen?

Grandpa Vernon, as always, had the answer: there was a Kaiser dealer out that way, so there was ample opportunity for local farmers to buy ’em. In the post-war booming, accompanied by REA, improved roads and transportation, and new farming techniques, farmers did pretty good for themselves, plenty enough to warrant spending a bit on a nice new car.

So, as you might have noticed, I’ve been scanning and uploading more of my Early 20th Century Minnesota Farmland series — if I were more organized, I could point out the new ones better, but, sadly, there’s just so many of them. New images are primarily the last 1/4 of the Black Album, and all of the Red Album.