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Currently viewing the category: "Heidi Bakk-Hansen : What’s In a Name?"

Colbyville: Duluth’s Garden Spot

On May 16, 2013 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
HouseAD_ColumnHBH
Duluth is full of neighborhoods with lost or nearly-lost names. As modern Duluthians become more mobile and have less connection to the place they live in, borders blend or move, and names disappear. Last year, a local article made mention of a man who reported he lived in Woodland, near the intersection of Snively Road and Woodland Avenue. According to city maps, this is actually Hunters Park. But should he ask any longtime neighbors, [...]
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Calling Dr. Walbank….

On April 11, 2013 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
Dr. S. S. Walbank photographed at Ontonogan, Michigan, in the 1860s. (Image: Dan Dobrik)
Wallbank’s Park is probably one of the smallest and least recognized of Duluth’s park facilities. In fact, unless you happen to be a geocaching hobbyist, it’s a safe bet you’ve never heard of it. But there it is, right west of Lincoln Park in the center of a group of true north-south, east-west streets in the historic West End. The eighty acres surrounding Wallbank’s Park were once owned by Dr. Samuel Seddon Walbank, and most [...]
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Powel Crosley makes his mark on Duluth’s Lakeside

On March 11, 2013 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
Powel Crosley c. 1882. (Image: E. Boyer)
Crosley Avenue in Lakeside sticks out as a bit of an incongruity. Unlike the rest of the streets in the neighborhood, it roughly parallels the lakeshore like Superior Street and London Road. In fact, if you view it in an aerial photographic, you can see that it fronts a neighborhood that is distinctly less developed than the rest of Lakeside. The streets are wider, and the space between them is greater. This is because Crosley [...]
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Mary McFadden: Duluth’s Inkpot Warrior

On March 1, 2013 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
Mary McFaddden, from a 1907 image from the Duluth News-Tribune, quality compromised by microfilm conversion. It was the best image of McFadden we could find. (Image: X-Comm)
Along with all the moneymakers who roared into town during the boom times at the turn of the century, there were those who followed the money, eager to live in what was expected to be the next great city—the “Pittsburgh of the North,” say, or even as great as Chicago or New York. Duluth’s central location on the continent, nestled against the greatest of the Great Lakes, made its future the talk of the nation. [...]
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What’s in a Name: The Tailor and the Carpenter

On February 11, 2013 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
HouseAD_ColumnHBH
When most people think of Swedes and religion, they think of Lutherans. But in Duluth’s West End, where Swedes moved from Swede Town on Rice’s Point on up the hill as far as Piedmont Heights as their fortunes improved, another group of religious Swedes found a home. Organizing themselves in 1884, the First Swedish Baptist Church dedicated their first building in 1887, at the corner of First Street and 20th Avenue West , with [...]
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The Painter and the Skipper: Two Brothers of the Second Wave

On January 14, 2013 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
George La Vaque: The "skipper." (Image: Duluth Public Library.)
While Lavaque Road only runs within the Duluth city limits for .06 miles, it is a distinctly Duluth thoroughfare. For a time it was a key route through rural Duluth and Proctor (formerly Proctorknott) to Hermantown. It is called County Highway 48 as it wends its way north, becomes one with Boundary Avenue during its brief pass through Duluth, and is synonymous with Proctor’s Second Avenue. Its familiar name has morphed for modern: it was [...]
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E. P. Alexander: Son of the Confederacy—Grandfather to Watergate

On December 10, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
A sketch of E. P. Alexander, Jr., that appeared in the Duluth News Tribune in October, 1904, likely drawn by R. D. Handy, who parodied many business leaders of his time in caricatures depicting them engaged in their business or hobbies or, in this case, both. (Image: X-Comm.)
Alexander Street is tiny, nothing more than an alley behind the Holiday Station off 26th Avenue East, parallel to Jefferson Street in Congdon Park. It has now basically become an entrance to the eastern portion of the Lakewalk, swallowed up by London Road development. Its namesake, Edward Porter Alexander—known as E. P. Alexander—has likewise been swallowed up by the movement of time marching onward—another Duluth man who came during those peak money-making years to buy [...]
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Duluth’s Invisible Investor

On November 8, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
HouseAD_ColumnHBH
Lillian Avenue is somewhat of an enigma, a tiny one-block street in Piedmont Heights hosting only four houses. Its namesake, Lillian H. Mosher, was herself much more of an intriguing enigma, and remains so today. As we’ve mentioned before, most Duluth streets that are named for people were given those names by the original plat-developers, who often celebrated themselves. These real estate owners were invariably men. Female first name streets are almost always named [...]
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The Repetitiously Named Dickermans’ West Duluth Investments

On October 8, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
Charles Dickerman. (Duluth Public Library.)
During the boom times between 1890 and 1910, the Kitchi Gammi Club set must have read the real estate transfer section of the newspaper as hotly as gossips read the society pages. Properties flew between investors, land subdivided and re-divided, streets planned one way and then the other, named and re-named. Whole neighborhoods were carved out of the rocky hillside, and houses sold on spec. The Dickerman family and their [...]
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It’s Not Just the Husband Who Makes the Name

On September 10, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
HouseAD_ColumnHBH
Almost all streets in Duluth that aren’t numbers, places or trees are named for dead white men. It’s regrettable, surely. But as anyone who’s looked at a deed or plat map knows, men were the developers, the real estate buyers, and the ones who decided what the street names would be called. A great number of them decided to name the streets they developed after themselves, though if the property was large enough, you’ll [...]
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Duluth’s Woodland Neighborhood: Shaped by Streetcars

On September 1, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
When the land around Woodland Avenue, from Hunter's Park up to Woodland Park, was first developed, it was still heavily forested, and encounters with wild animals were common, as this humorous postcard from 1905 illustrates. (Image: X-Comm.)
Duluth’s neighborhoods each have their distinct histories and personalities borne out of the developers who carved them out of the wilderness, the settlers who lived there, and the circumstances that shaped what they became. Duluth’s Woodland neighborhood was no exception, and its developers relied heavily on the Motor Line Improvement Company—and later the Duluth Street Railway Company—to make the community accessible. In the process, these elements created Duluth’s premier “streetcar [...]
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Two Moneybags Named Hulett

On August 6, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
HouseAD_ColumnHBH
I imagine that sometime during the life of Nehemiah Hulett, somebody must have called him Old Moneybags. Perhaps even after he was dead, since his money and death precipitated one of the more interesting scandals of 1890s Duluth. Nehemiah Hulett was one of our earliest fortune-seeking pioneers, arriving here in 1857, when he was 34 years old and a bachelor. Originally a New Yorker, he spent a brief time in other up-and-coming Minnesota towns [...]
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Lenroot Makes His Addition

On July 3, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
lars Lenroot standing in front of his home in Superior, ca. 1890. (Image: Duluth Public Library.)
America’s favorite story about itself is that no matter how poor an immigrant might be when he or she lands on its shores, success is within reach if one works hard and takes advantages of the country’s abundant opportunities. While the Twin Ports have scores of Horatio Alger-style stories to tell, only a few those include names that have become part of the maps of both Superior and Duluth. One of them is Swedish immigrant [...]
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Scotland’s Isle of Lewis helped shape Duluth

On June 8, 2012 By Heidi Bakk-Hansen
ZCA_Features_IsleofLewis_wiki
Dig deep enough into the clannish histories of any smaller city in America and you’ll find lines of immigration that darken well-trodden paths from even smaller places all over Europe. Relatives bring relatives, childhood friends invite childhood friends, and soon enough you have neighborhoods called Little Italy or Polish Town where a handful of names encompass a dense intermarriage mosaic tracing back to some obscure place in the Old Country. It could be said [...]
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What’s in a Name: Who the heck was Jean Duluth?

On May 1, 2012 By Administrator
ZCA_Bio_duLhut_001_DPL
Go ahead and ask Duluthians about where the name of Jean Duluth Road comes from, and they will squint their eyes and answer you after a moment’s thought… “It’s that French voyageur, right? I guess we don’t say his name the French way anymore.” Sure, Jean Duluth. Like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, except now we’ve Americanized it like so many American places and pronounce it Jeen instead of Dzahn. There is a problem, however: the French trader [...]
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