The Polk County Historical Society will hold its annual Pioneer Day at the Polk County Museum in Crookston (at 719 Robert Street) on Sunday, September 7, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Food, musical entertainment, wagon rides, and demonstrations will be going on throughout the day.
“We have brats from B&E Meats and then sloppy joes and chips and pie, and we’re going to have a bunch of good pies this year. And then coffee and water, so nothing fancy. It’s the biggest part of our fundraiser for the day,” said Hannah. “Then we have ongoing demonstrations. We have the hit-and-miss engines, and fortunately, we have a young man on our board who is a mechanical wizard with these old motors, and rather than just having them sitting there, he gets them running. So hopefully we’ll have a few of them running and probably some old tractors running around.”
They will be selling Lefse again this year. “At the back of the museum, we’ll have the lefse making there, and they’re selling it,” said Hannah. “As always, it sells faster than they can even cook it. I mean, we’ve never had leftover lefse.”
There will be a new demonstration with the addition of wheat weaving, along with some of the old favorites. “If you want to see how things were done in the old days, making baskets and stuff like that, it takes a lot of patience,” said Hannah. “And we also have Clara Kargel, and she’s going to do wool combing and carding on the spinning wheel.”
Randy Oberg from the Grand Rapids area will demonstrate blacksmithing. “It’s the old-style way of doing it, where he’s got to have the hand bellows to get the coals hot, and everything is made with a hammer and bending and everything, and he enjoys having people watching while he’s doing it,” said Hannah.
There will also be musical entertainment, with The Rusty Chords Trio performing in the Centennial Building at 1:00 p.m., Vidar Skrede performing Nordic Folk music in the Halfslo Church at 2:15 p.m., and the Woodpicks performing at 3:30 p.m. Musical entertainment is made possible by grants from the Northwest Minnesota Arts Council.
There will be free wagon rides with horses from Point Paradise Stables from 1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Pioneer Days is free to attend, but donations are welcome. Everyone is invited to Pioneer Days at the Polk County Museum in Crookston on Sunday, September 7, from 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.