What material objects would you select to represent the 20th century?

Trying to answer that question provides some insight into the difficulty of selecting items to tell stories about life in a given place and time.

The Society's curators were asked to select from the collections objects that represent the 20th century. The results show a broad range of artifacts that tell Minnesota's stories over time, and their wish list gives an idea of work that remains to be done.

Curator Adam Scher chose the one-of-a-kind automobile built in 1906 by Ole Bjella, a blacksmith from McIntosh, Minn. Constructed from the carriage of a horse-drawn buggy, the Bjella was fitted with a two-cylinder, air-cooled engine that had a top speed of 20 miles per hour. Unable to secure financing to mass-produce the vehicle, Bjella built only one car and then returned to making sleighs and harrows.

Scher's wish list included a Minneapolis Moline tractor until one was donated to the Society. Scher says tractors helped increase the productivity of Minnesota's family farms. Scher also would like to acquire more athletic uniforms and equipment connected to significant Minnesota sports figures as well as flight gear from pioneering Minnesota aviators.

Archaeology curator Chuck Diesen finds the question difficult because his work does not often cover the 20th century. As for archaeology, Diesen says, the Society has only a few small collections of 20th century materials, including objects from the Charles Lindbergh House in Little Falls and the dumps of the Red Wing Pottery factory and Nina Clifford's infamous St. Paul bordello — recently excavated from the site of the new Science Museum of Minnesota.

Diesen says it is fruitless to assemble an archaeological wish list. "We function as a repository for most of the archaeological material collected in Minnesota but do not in any way direct the field research that adds new material to our holdings."

Textile curator Linda McShannock says a purple and orange designer coat made by textile artist Nancy MacKenzie from onion sacks represents the 20th century to her. MacKenzie, a Minnesota artist, makes clothing from recycled materials, such as the plastic mesh bags grocery stores discard after removing the vegetables. For the coat, MacKenzie used purple mesh onion bags and baling twine as piping. The coat is lined with her own custom-dyed cotton lining.

"In the 19th century," McShannock said, "people who made clothing from recycled material did so out of necessity, due to scarcity or unavailability of goods. At the end of the 20th century, some recycled clothing makes a fashion statement about the abundance of available materials."

"The story of 20th century textiles is centered around technology and synthetic materials that were unavailable in the 19th century: plastics, nylon, polyester and synthetic rubber, like Spandex. The colors, style and materials of these garments would all be foreign to the 19th-century consumer," she says.

Recycling onion bags into clothing, as MacKenzie did, echoes an early 20th-century practice of making clothes from another type of recycled product packaging — feed and flour sacks. "We have MacKenzie's coat and hat in the collection, and I'd like to add examples of printed cotton feed-sack clothing," McShannock says.

For her representative objects, Marcia Anderson, chief curator and head of museum collections, selected a set of clothing worn by American Indian activist Joe Campbell of Prairie Island. The outfit consists of a vest of patterned wool and leather made by Patty Beaulieu of Leech Lake, a denim shirt with beading by Richard Mason of Red Lake, jeans, a turquoise and black neckerchief and Red Wing boots that Campbell wore loosely laced.

"Joe has been wearing this 'traditional' look since about 1985 so that people would identify him and his personal stance on an issue," Anderson says. "By always appearing in these clothes at demonstrations, meetings and other public settings, Joe is making a statement against nuclear power plants — the one at Prairie Island in particular.

"Joe's clothing is representative of our expanded collecting focus, developed with help from the Society's Indian Advisory Committee, to better document the daily lives of contemporary American Indians in Minnesota," Anderson says. "Joe's apparel represents how one person relies on elements of his traditional values to preserve a healthy lifestyle for himself and his community."

Curator Claudia Nicholson listed a blue hospital gown in the Society's collection as representative of the 20th century. It bears white vertical stripes and an inverted pink fabric triangle over the left breast. The costume was used by Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender activists to protest a call for the forced quarantine of people with AIDS. In 1994, activist Leo Treadway donated the costume he wore during this protest.

"It represents an important turning point in the GLBT community's activism, but it represents more than that. It's also about the rise of minority rights, one of the most important political movements of the 20th century," Nicholson says.

Thomas O'Sullivan, former art curator, believes that the Society's large wood-relief collage "Untitled" (1975), by Minnesota artist George Morrison, sums up the 20th century in a distinctive way. The collage has a high "wow factor," which stops visitors and stimulates discussion. "And when you bring to it some knowledge of the artist and his Indian heritage, it becomes richer and richer."

Mark Greene, former chief of manuscripts acquisition, said asking curators to select an artifact to represent the century oversimplifies the complexities of collecting. The Society's holdings represent "thousands of disparate, though sometimes interconnecting, strands of evidence about how people lived, why organizations made decisions, etc. No individual pieces of this total is 'most representative' of the 20th century because this century — like every century before — is infinitely complicated, nuanced and diverse."

The Society's purpose, Greene asserts, is to capture and preserve some of those strands.

"While I would not go so far as to say that all the evidence we have captured is of equal weight or value, I am certain that there is no mechanism, philosophy or magic that can tell us whether the Hubert Humphrey papers are more or less representative of the 20th century than the Republic Airlines records, the files of the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union, the diaries of William Cummings or any one of several hundred other manuscript collections," he says.

View information about other unusual artifacts held by the Minnesota Historical Society, including a Minneapolis Moline farm tractor.