DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Devils Lake Central High School
January 5: Education has always played an important part throughout the history of North Dakota, and in Devils Lake, the first school opened in a temporary location in November of 1883. Four years later, the first framed school building was constructed. It was soon inadequate for the rapid growth in the Lake Region and in 1893, a new red brick school was built.
With the addition of buildings for grade schools, the “Little Red School House” was able to continue in operation for almost thirty years, but by the end of the 1920s an effort was mounted to build a new school. In 1930, when F. H. Gilliland was hired as Superintendent of the Devils Lake School District, he set his sights on a new building. Securing $160,000 from the Works Progress Administration, he managed to lead a matching $175,000 bond drive. With local architect John Marshall and St. Cloud architect Nairne Fisher providing the plans, the school became a reality.
Now known as the Central Middle School, the old Central High School was constructed in 1936 and dedicated in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression. Situated at the end of 4th Avenue on a T-intersection, the imposing, Art Deco structure commands the attention of people looking north from the central business district. A few blocks south of the high school stands the World War Memorial Building in a complimentary Art Deco style.
Central High School is a two-story, symmetrical building with a partial basement and a flat roof. The entire building is brick with highlights of limestone. There is little ornamentation, giving it a clean, modern look. The main entrance is enhanced with pilasters or inset columns that project vertically from the base to the roof. The front windows are also decorated with vertical pilasters carved into the limestone. The original building was U-shaped with a large, integrated auditorium projecting from the northwest corner on the rear of the building. Large rectangular windows line the exterior and provide natural lighting with sunken windows on the northeast corner providing natural light to the music room. The interior contains terrazzo floors in the halls with maple wood in the classrooms. Ornamental plaster adorns the walls throughout the building.
On this date in 2003, Devils Lake Central High School was added to the National Register of Historic Places. After almost ninety years, it remains a proud symbol of North Dakota’s commitment to quality education.
Dakota Datebook by Jim Davis
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Governor Frank Briggs
January 6: It was on this day, January 6, 1897 that Frank Briggs was sworn in as North Dakota’s fifth governor. But his tenure would prove tragically brief.
Frank Arlington Briggs was born on September 15, 1858, to a successful carpenter in Hennepin County, Minnesota. Following school, Briggs’ entered the newspaper industry where he prospered as both a printer and editor. Married to Nannie Meek in 1877, the couple moved to Dakota Territory in 1881. There, in the budding communities of the Northern Plains, Briggs worked as a bookkeeper, Mandan real estate agent and eventually in the public sector as one of Mandan’s early postmasters. Following his stint with the postal service, Briggs began his relatively rapid rise to the top of North Dakota politics; first serving as Morton County’s treasurer in 1886, then advancing to statewide office as North Dakota State Auditor, eight years later.
In 1896, Briggs reached the summit of North Dakota politics, succeeding his fellow Republican, Governor Roger Allin, to the governor’s mansion. Briggs’ responsibilities as governor were not limited only to state and local problems, but international as well.
On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana harbor. The ship’s demise only increased tensions between the United States and Spain, eventually resulting in war between the two countries. This was the first major national conflict since North Dakota had been admitted as a state, and many among the state’s population were eager to prove their worth on the battlefield.
Numerous community leaders pressed Governor Briggs for commissions or other favors allowing them to recruit their own men for the war. Briggs, while not necessarily interested in the niceties of military protocol in selecting officers, was very interested in the political fallout should he not select the best candidates to lead the companies North Dakota would send to the Spanish-American War.
Ultimately, Briggs avoided bruising the sensibilities of potential political foes by granting the National Guard preference in forming the state’s wartime forces. Not only did this save Briggs any potential political embarrassment, he gave the National Guard veteran leaders command of its troops, instead of political hacks.
Although Briggs worked hard to establish himself as a competent governor, his term was cut short. On August 9, 1898, just 19 months after his inauguration, Governor Briggs died of tuberculosis, becoming the first North Dakota governor to die while in office.
Newspapers from around the state wrote of Briggs’ virtues for days following his death, while the remaining portion of his term was completed by Lt. Governor Joseph Devine. Although Briggs was laid to rest in his family’s plot in Howard Lake, Minnesota, some maintain that his spirit resides still in North Dakota; haunting the old governor’s mansion where he died more than 125 years ago.
Dakota Datebook by Lane Sunwall
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Jens Dixen’s School
January 7: Danish settlements were founded across North Dakota, but the largest and best-known were in the northwest portion of the state. By 1910, this region held 25% of all Danes in North Dakota.
Their presence remains highly visible even today. Names like Denmark Township leave little doubt as to its original occupants, and the Danish windmill in Kenmare continues to draw tourists. However, a small stone monument north of Kenmare may be less familiar. This monument was erected in 1952 to honor Brorson, a Danish folk school, and its principal, Jens Dixen.
Born in Denmark in 1858, Jens Dixen immigrated to Wisconsin and eventually North Dakota, establishing a homestead north of Kenmare in 1901. With an interest in evangelism and missions, Dixen became active in the Trinity Danish Evangelical Lutheran congregation.
Through this local church, he found an opportunity to excite others about Christian missions when the local pastor organized a school for young Danish men who needed something useful to occupy the winter months. Holding classes first in the parsonage and later in the church, the pastor and two female instructors offered a variety of religious and secular subjects in both English and Danish. A separate boarding house offered accommodations. The school proved so successful that it continued the following winter and was officially named Brorson High School, in honor of the Danish hymn writer.
By 1905, at the prompting of Jens Dixen, a school building was erected next to the church. At a cost of $7,000, the three story building included classrooms and accommodations for up to forty students as well as an apartment for the new principal, Jens Dixen. Enrollment quickly increased, ranging from thirty to forty students each winter, paying $55 for tuition, room and board. The school also increased operation from four months to six.
The private school continued to flourish; enrollment reached as high as 56 in 1913. But after the United States became involved in World War I, enrollment declined and the school closed its doors in 1920. The building fell out of use and Jens Dixen pursued other missions-minded endeavors.
Although short-lived, the Danish folk school left an indelible mark on the national and international religious landscape. Twenty-five former students became pastors, including Dixen’s adopted son. Dixen inspired several students and teachers from Brorson to go into the foreign mission field, and today, the Lutheran Church of Christ in Nigeria still recognizes Dixen’s influence as a crucial part of their early foundation.
Jens Dixen died on this date in 1931. Twenty-one years later, residents of the Kenmare region honored his service by erecting a stone monument marking the former site of Brorson High School.
Dakota Datebook by Christina Sunwall
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Gold Rush in Lisbon
January 8: “Gold.” The mere mention of the word sets pulses pounding and hearts longing for the glistening yellow metal. When a landowner finds flecks of gold on his land, he hopes for bigger flakes, or golden nuggets, or even the mother lode.
Such a landowner was H.W. Griswold, a Chicago businessman, who bought 340 acres of Ransom County land, nine miles west of the fledgling town of Lisbon in the spring of 1883. Griswold bought acreage along the beautiful Sheyenne River – presumably as cattle pasturage. Sometime that summer, however, Mr. Griswold found gold in a mound of dirt thrown up by a gopher. He took the dirt to an assayer and was told “it was rich in gold.”
Griswold searched further and found more gold in an “eighty-foot ledge” of quartz and other rocks, and had it analyzed by experts. The analysis on 130 specimens of sand and rock calculated out to $414 to $1,360 of gold to the pan, with some silver in there, too.
News of the gold leaked out through an electrifying article in the local Lisbon newspaper in late October, 1883. Within days, a Lisbon Gold Rush was on, as articles appeared in Grand Forks, Bismarck, and all the way to Chicago and New York.
Griswold gathered a cadre of Chicago investors to buy rock-crushing mining machinery, and their company started ore-digging immediately. Other frenzied gold-seekers bought up the land along the Sheyenne River, for twenty miles from Lisbon to Fort Ransom. Lisbon was wild with excitement – with gold fever.
But, on this date in 1884, the Grand Forks Herald reported that Griswold and his associates had “abandoned all further mining enterprises until spring,” leaving “one by one” as a frigid Dakota winter touched their fingers and toes.
When April arrived, Griswold came back, bringing an ore-crushing machine to smash an accumulated 2,000 tons of raw ore. During the summer, the gold rush fizzled – Griswold’s ore didn’t pan out. By August, a report said that the “few people who worked the Lisbon gold mines have quit.”
Once the Lisbon gold rush was over, shouts of “gold!” were hushed and replaced by the murmuring waters of the Sheyenne River flowing over the shining gravel near the former “Griswold Mine.”
Dakota Datebook written by Dr. Steve Hoffbeck
DAKOTA DATEBOOK: Renville
January 9: On this date in 1933, Mr. Felix Renville and his wife were getting ready to travel from their home in Fort Yates to New York to appear on Robert Ripley’s radio program, “Believe It or Not.”
According to an article in the Mandan Daily News, the curious event prompting the show to invite Renville extended back to 1918, during World War I, when he was a machine gunner in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
The Meuse-Argonne campaign started on September 26, 1918, and was the final large-scale offensive of World War I. The battle lasted until the Armistice. In the process, more than 26,000 Americans were killed, and over 120,000 wounded.
On November 2, the day after the final push began, Felix Renville was injured so badly that he was thought to be dead. Gassed, and suffering from multiple shrapnel wounds, he said his body was examined by a buddy, his corporal and captain. None of them found any sign of life.
“The corporal pushed me…called my name,” Renville later reported. “I was bleeding and didn’t seem to breathe. He put me down and went on.”
Luckily for Renville, who was left for dead on the battlefield, he was nonetheless carried off to a hospital by first aid men. When he regained consciousness, more than10 days later, he asked the man on the bed next to him about the progress of the war.
“It was over two days ago,” the man replied.
Renville, who was a Sioux Indian, stated that blood transfusions left him with “mostly Irish and Swedish blood.”
After he came to, he contacted his father, to make sure he knew he was alive – and, according to Renville, after all the uncertainty, this positive proof of his son’s life caused Renville’s father to have a heart attack. He died before Felix returned to North Dakota.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is a franchise that began in 1918, involving cartoons, books, film, TV, Internet, and radio – sharing the story of “bizarre events and items so strange and unusual” that listeners might question the claims, including the story of a North Dakota boy who for a time, had claimed a spot amidst the “legion of the dead.”
Dakota Datebook written by Sarah Walker
“Dakota Datebook” is a radio series from Prairie Public in partnership with the State Historical Society of North Dakota and with funding from the North Dakota Humanities Council. See all the Dakota Datebooks at prairiepublic.org, subscribe to the “Dakota Datebook” podcast, or buy the Dakota Datebook book at shopprairiepublic.org.
