Lakeland PBSpbs presents Common
Ground, brought to you by the
Minnesota Arts and Cultural
Heritage Fund

and the citizens of Minnesota.
Production funding of Common
Ground is made possible in part
by First

National Bank Bemidji,
continuing their second century
of service to the community.
Member FDIC.

Welcome to Common Ground. I'm
Pproducer/Director Scott
Knudson.

In this 2- segment episode made
by the two newest additions to
Lakeland's Legacy production
team,

we visit the Butter and Dairy
Museum in Vergas, Minnesota, and
the Crow Wing Viking Fest in
Brainerd.

Welcome to the Crow Wing Viking
Festival. It's August 21st, and
the festival

opened at 10 a.m this morning
and it goes to 4 30 this
afternoon. This is our 2nd
annual

festival. We weren't, of course,
able to do it last year. There
are a ton of fun things to do
here.

Viking Fest is a celebration
of all things Viking.

There's so much misinformation,
and the first one is that
Vikings had horns. The

horns came about from an 1800's
Wagner Opera. The costume
designer thought that horns on
helmets

would be cool, and they are, but
that wasn't what the real
Vikings were about. There's a
lot of

misconceptions about the
Vikings, my ancestors, and so
this celebrates all things
legitimately,

real Viking. We came up with
that slogan "Real Vikings, No
Horns," There's a lot to learn,
they're

very interesting people, very
sophisticated, very structural
society, women were held in high
esteem

and there's a lot to know about
the Viking culture. I'm Julie
Guth, and I'm the coordinator
for the

Crow Wing Viking festival, and
one of a group of 7 people who
do the planning for this.

I just, I love Vikings, and so I
wanted to share actual Viking
culture, "Real Vikings, No
Horns"

with people in the area and from
all over. I'm dan Hegstad, and I
am a volunteer with the Crow

Wing Viking Festival. I do a lot
of the PR and Marketing, and
we're a small group so I do kind

of whatever needs doing. One of
the reasons there's so many
people at the Crow Wing Viking
Festival is

because there's just so much to
see and do here. If you look
around, you see so many families
and

who wouldn't want to come to
Brainerd, Minnesota for a nice
weekend in the summer and enjoy
this?

The kids are having a great
time, there's a whole building
of kids crafts, and things for
kids

to do. Jacob, here, my new
friend, was showing me the craft
that he made, its a flying
dragon. "Nobody else

made it with the flame, because
I thought it would be cool, so
it's breathing fire, this is my
shoe, the

middle is supposed to be like an
eyeball." There's also "rune
writing," kids can write their
names in

in runes, and it's in
self-hardening clay and there
are few other crafts in the
building as

well. It's been a really popular
area. We have lots of food for
the whole family, and then
behind me

the Viking encampment. It's,
what if these Vikings were
traveling and they stopped for a
few days.

I'm here at the potters, we have
almost everything here; we have
pottery, we have wood supplies,
we have

jewelry, we have drinking horns.
There's someone working on a
warp-weighted loom

over there, which is what they
used to create the sails for the
ships, among other things.

There's so many things here, all
the crafts, there's a
blacksmith, people doing
open-fire cooking.

We also have somebody who wrote
an epic poem that he has
illustrated in a book that's
going

to be around here, too, and he's
going to be doing readings.
"some lumpish rings, a gilded
aurochs horn

crusted with gems, a sentry
shrieked, the devils thronged,
and all but 30 of my men were
torn

to shrimp." We have the mock
battles, the people are really
enjoying that, it's family
friendly

but still very realistic. They
do a great job of balancing
that, keeping it family
friendly.

The Vikings have always
fascinated me, and of course,
you know I'm a Norwegian
American, at

least partly, and so it's part
of my cultural heritage. I've
always wanted to know more

and I was absolutely delighted
to find out that the Vikings did
more than just raiding,

there was a whole really complex
culture that was highly
artistic, for one thing, and the

ships that they built were state
of the art. I love this event
because it's real, "Real
Vikings, No Horns."

It's fun, but the organizers
were serious that it's not going
to be silly. This isn't a
costume party,

this is about the real Vikings,
my heritage. When I did the the
genetic test, it showed

a very small part of Norway and
a little bit of Sweden. That's
where my people are is right
there.

I'm all Scandinavian, and this
celebrates my ancestors, and
they were some really

interesting people. They did
some pretty nasty stuff, there's
no question about that,

but the culture was something to
be celebrated, and I'm really
glad to be involved in that. It
started

because I attended a Viking
festival in Moorhead, Hjemkomst,
and I thought it was so
interesting and

I started talking to the
re-enactors and I thought "Wow,"
"wouldn't that be a great event
to bring to the

Brainerd community?" It's
totally different from anything
else that we have here. When we
did

the first Viking Festival 2
years ago in Nisswa, we had no
idea how many people were going
to come

200, 300? We had almost 950
people at that first one. We
knew we were doing the right
thing.

Nisswa was great, but just not
enough room to even host the
1000 people that came, but here
we are

at the Crow Wing County
Fairgrounds, which is such a
great venue for us because we
have plenty of room to do

the mock battles, a nice
location here for the viking
encampment, tons of free
parking, all the

food vendors, we have all that
infrastructure power and so
forth that they need. Animals,
you

can have animals at the
fairgrounds, so we've got the
horses and the sheep and we can
expand that.

I hope even bigger and better
than this, we'd like to add
re-enactors every year, we'd
certainly like

even more vendors who are doing
Viking-related things to come
in, but this could be a huge
event

for years to come. We could have
thousands of people coming to
the Crow Wing Viking Festival.

I really think it's a regional
event, there's a lot of
Norwegians in North Dakota,
Wisconsin, all

over Minnesota. I think people
can come here to Brainerd and
enjoy this for years to come.

We're in Gordon's Butter and
Dairy Museum, which is located
in the lower level of the bank
in Vergas.

Gordon owned the bank, and he
was President and Chairman of
the Board here at the bank.

Gordon loved this sign that's
behind me that says, "What they
have created, let us preserve."

If you do not know where you
came from, or if you do not know
what the beginning and

the history of it was, it's
really hard to understand where
you're at. Gordon

truly believed that, so he's
like, "Okay, I loved farming."

He was 11 years old when he was
milking cows, once before he
went to school, and after
school.

It was hard work, they did a lot
of the stuff themselves, even
built the barns and all the
sheds.

they built em themselves, of
course with neighbors help. It
was an interesting time and

this is back in the 30's. He was
very proud of his heritage,
growing up on a farm, even at
the bank

here, he loved it when the
farmers would come in and visit.
Farming was always in his heart,
and

stayed there. He loved the the
simplicity of it, he loved the
genuine honest hard work of it.

as he became older and went into
a different profession,
obviously,

he still kept that passion. Back
in the day, through the bank
here, we also clerked auction
sales

and so I think a lot of the
stuff in the museum here, he
picked up at those auction
sales, too, by

clerking them, and so he was
always the first one to bid on
that stuff that came up on the
auction sale.

When he got that first piece at
an auction sale, and then the
next piece, and then people
started

hearing about it, and I think
that's what happened in the
community, too. People started
hearing there

was a place to put some of their
items that they had the same
passion about, that they wanted
people

to remember. You collect one
thing, and it turned into 600
items, so you know how that
goes.

He really loved collecting, we
rode around with him, so we
didn't miss an antique store.

I mean, I was probably "that
high," and we hit every one
between here and Minneapolis and
Arizona, so it

was kind of fun. Us siblings
would take turns driving him
back and forth to Scottsdale,
Arizona,

where he wintered. You never
took the interstate, you always
took back roads, because that's

where all the antique shops
were. There's always one churn
that he's been looking for,
forever, even

until the day he died, was a no.
10 Daisy Churn. We've stopped at
every antique store between

Scottsdale, Arizona and Vergas,
Minnesota looking for that no.
10 Daisy Churn and we never
found it.

Here you had Gordon's
vision of being able to

display not only the churns, but
then he was able to have enough
space that he could

expand it. All that you're going
to see that's curated, that's
Gordon, he displayed it.

This is where it all started,
this is the very first butter
churn that Gordon purchased at
an

auction sale, and then he bought
another one and then he bought
another one, and then all

of a sudden, it turned into...
like you're going to see over
600 items here. In this area
here, are

just a lot of the different
churns that he had. We've got
some of the cream separators
over here,

when you stop and think of this,
this is how milk was delivered,
this is an actual liquid
container

that the milk was delivered in.
I think the thing that always
intrigues me, too, is when you
look at

these butter churns, nothing's
electric. There was a lot of
work that was put into all of
this, and so

whether I think you were shaking
the jar, or turning it, or
whatever, there

is just ...It wasn't electric,
it was, to get to that point it

took some some muscle, maybe
that's why everybody was so in
shape back then.

Gordon liked to display things.
One of Gordon's other passions
was woodworking and

so he built a lot of these
display cases. He built all the
little items that

would hold, what we've got
here is the butter molds.

these butter molds are so
intriguing because they are so
intricate in what they have, as
far as like a pineapple, or a

and then that would kind of be
your signature thing, when you
would take butter to maybe a

family gathering or whatever.
You would put the butter in
there, and you would put it down
on a plate,

and that mold would go on top
and then the top of your butter
would just have that
beautiful ..

whatever your symbol was, and so
theres a lot of the different
butter molds.

Then these were the paddles,
obviously these are smaller ones
but

I think one of the things that
Gordon..Well, he loved De Laval,
as you can see. He

collected the different signs
and anything De Laval, he would
end up buying. This right here
is a

Franklin cream cooler, and Ed
Franklin, who started Franklin
Fence here in Vergas, he
invented this,

so this was a pretty big deal.
There was a new cream-grading
law thing that came out through

the dairy states, and it
improved the quality of
everything, and he invented this
and there were

testimonials and there were.. it
got to be a big deal. Gordon
ended up with one of those

Franklin cream coolers, and he
was always pretty proud of the
fact that a guy from Vergas is

who invented that. As you can
see back here, he kind of got
into some of the De Laval,

just the little intricate type
things, they had letter openers,
just some kind

of those things that would come
out at Christmas time. Then up
above, and you'll see this

throughout the whole museum, are
the different cheese boxes and
so anytime, if you couldn't find

that No. 10 Daisy Churn, you had
to buy a cheese box. There's a
cheese box from just about

every creamery that you can
find, from Arizona to Minnesota,
so that's what those are for,
too,

All right, what we've got here
is just a beautiful case that
Gordon loved to display probably
some

of the more breakable things,
and because he was always hoping
that kids would come down here,
and

so he'd have some of those
little butter dishes down there
that definitely are antiques,
and

some of the little items came
from the creamery here, the
different things that they would
use to

test the different cream and
different things that would make
sure that everything was working

good. That's where he kind of
put his books and everything.
That cow he got from Germany,

this is a hand-carved cow that a
neighbor of his went to Germany
and then they were talking

about the butter museum, and so
they came, this came in the
mail. I remember when that
happened.

We keep in a prominent place
here - the picture, this is the
first picture of Gordon,

milking cows back when he was a
young kid. You don't see a lot
of machines there, I think it

was pretty much done by hand. I
think one of the things here,
too, that I always think about,
are

these watch fobs. You see the De
Laval, you see the cow, and I
think of this only because

you get to a point where you've
probably collected everything
that you can as far as

molds and separators and churns
and things like that. This was
one of the last things that he
was

working on collecting before his
death, and I know that he was
looking for those watch fobs

in a lot of different places,
and was trying to grow his
collection

a little bit in that. He became
very fond of having the watch
fobs. These little milk

covers here, again, just like
the butter boxes and just like
the cheese boxes, these were

what identified you as a dairy,
or as a farm that would deliver
milk. This would have

your name, "Shady Lane" or
"Catski Farm", or whatever it
was on it, and so these little
milk caps that

went on top of the milk bottle
like this, which was, you can
see, that identified who your
dairy was.

We're back in the area where
the ,,, When the creamery here
in Vergas closed ,

Gordon obtained, of course, a
lot of the things that were
there. You've got like your test
tubes, this

machine here would test the
different cream content, and
that was for making butter.

You would have all of that, you
would have the cream cans which
would bring in the cream.

The farmers would actually just
bring in their cream cans and
the scales, obviously this goes

back before it would get to the
creamery, these were what were
used on the farm after

you got past that point where
you had to do the milking by
hand.

Then, what was in this display
case is, you know how at
Christmas everybody, all

of the businesses, when they
used to be able to economically
afford it, they would give that

Christmas gift away to their
patrons, to their customers; and
these are some of the
different..

whether it be the little cream
pitchers, or some years you had
utensils, and so there's

a display of that too. We also
have, comes back to the dairy
days, and so it's fun, he kept a
lot of

the posters from that era too,
and so you can see the evolution
of that, from how it was such a,
it was a

big deal in town. It was a lot
of fun and he had him dressed up
all the way back there to the
60's.

Okay, so what you're seeing here
is, obviously all the milk
bottles and stuff,

but these are the churns. You
notice the lone spot up here
where the No. 10 Daisy Churn

is missing. That spot will stay
there until we get that number
10, but these are the churns

that Gordon just, I mean, we
love, we would take these two
when we would go to Dairy Days
and

would just take them and put
that cream in and kids would
watch all of the cream turned to

butter. What we've got here,
which is really an interesting
machine to me, and couldn't you
just

see a kid just loving this you
sit on the seat there this a
farmer oh just outside of
virga's

had this you sit on the seat
there, and then you, of course,
attach this to the cow for the
milking.

Then, it's got the hand, you
would take your feet like that
and it would go, and it was just
kind

of a way that you didn't have to
use your hands. You got to build
up those leg muscles a lot.

A lot of people talk about "Okay
Gordon, why do you have a Maytag
washing machine in your butter
museum?"

Well, it's not just the mixers
that we get now that have all
the attachments with the pasta.
Back

then, they figured that out, you
put an attachment onto the
washing machine, and it'll churn
your butter!

So Gordon got one of those
Maytags that had the attachment
to churn the butter, and then,
of

course, the information
regarding it. That was a lot of
fun for him to obtain that.

We are in the overflow room, is
what I would call it, because
this room here was created

when Gordon had too many things
in the other room that we were
in. It's just created a

nice area to add some extra
things, some of the bigger
things. This cream separator
right here

is, actually, there's only 2 of
them in the whole United States
that anybody knows about. When

Gordon obtained it, the people
that he got it from said "You
know, it should actually be in a
museum."

Then cream carts and the cream
cans and of course, more cheese
boxes, but

one fun thing that we have here
is an old Vergas Street Light.
This was

the actual street light, there's
a photograph here with it that
shows people would go around at

night and they would light those
lights up on the streets, by
hand again, of course, it

wasn't an electric thing. I
think I mentioned the Land O'
Lakes Creamery Christmas
ornaments

and things too, and so he got
into that with Land O' Lakes and
just really supporting

our area dairy people and dairy
production areas. So, all the
milk bottles here, too, so it's

a nice spot, and of course, I
think a lot of people understand
what this is, because I think
that

a lot of people have in their
homes, it was one of the old
coolers, too so those are kind
of fun.

Here we are in Gordon's overflow
room, but what it was able to
create in here was

just another nice display case,
a beautiful display case, and
this one here obviously has
always been

one of my favorites, because
it's the dome butter dishes.
These are

very valuable, very beautiful,
intricate pieces. I don't think
that you would find these on

your typical farm table for
lunch every day, but if the
family was coming for a Sunday

dinner, or some special event,
you know they would use a butter
dish something like this.

Gordon was, like I said earlier,
always very loyal to the Vergas
Creamery and the people that

worked at the creamery. This
gentleman right here donated,
his family donated, this because
he

was the Creamery Manager for a
number of years. Then what
you've got there is

items that were actually used in
the creamery, so he liked to be
able to showcase those items,

but he also liked to be able to
showcase the person, who helped
promote dairy, who

helped work in the creamery, and
was part of that passion of, let
us preserve what has

been created, so if you come
down to Gordon's Dairy and
Butter Museum, you cannot walk
away

without one of his books. This
chronicles a lot of different
information, a lot of different
pictures,

and one of the old Vergas butter
dairy boxes. They're here and

you're welcome to take one home
with you, so that when you go
home, you can, when somebody
sees

them, they can say "Oh, where's
that?" you can say "Well, it's
located in the Vergas State
Bank, Lower Level,

you can go check it out because
it's a piece of history that we
just want to preserve."

You come down here, and you just
kind of step back in time, you
just take a little bit of time
and

if you do a little bit of
reading, you just understand
that Oh, man, somebody actually

60 years ago was handling that
butter dish and were putting
butter on the table for their
family.

There's something really cool
about that. The bank is open
every day during the week,
Monday

through Friday, 9:00 nine
o'clock until 5:00 o'clock.
There's somebody here that can
let you

come down here and let you
wander around and just go back
in time and and enjoy it. I
can't

believe that his family and his
kids and people who knew him

walk down here without feeling
the presence. I'm glad that he
did it, I mean, it was
interesting,

and he was really proud of it
and I think the whole family's
proud that he did it because

it started out with one churn
and turned into 600 items, so,
yeah, we're proud of him.

Thanks for watching. Join us
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Ground was made possible, in
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Bemidji,

continuing their 2nd century of
service to the community. Member
FDIC

Common Ground is brought to you
by the Minnesota Arts and
Cultural Heritage Fund

with money by the vote of
the people, November 4th, 2008.

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