Field Note

Judy Garland turned purple - Paint analysis at the Judy Garland Childhood Home determined that the original color was purple. MNHS staff visited the site for the unveiling of the restoration. The president of the museum, Rodger Nelson, was quoted as saying “This just proves that Judy knew that the most iconic Minnesota star is Prince.” Mary Tyler Moore had no comment when contacted.

Heritage Preservation Grants

Grants Office Announces a nearly 12-fold increase in the size of grant checks
The Grants Office proudly announces a nearly 12-fold increase in the size of grant cheques, scaling them from modest 6 x 2.75-inch sheets to sprawling 4 x 5-foot behemoths. Museum directors and nonprofit leaders rejoiced at first—until they realized the "increase" applied strictly to the physical dimensions of the paper, not the award amounts. Learn more »

Grants Office Book Club
April 1 @ 2 to 3 pm - St. Paul & Online: Join the first meeting of the Grants Office History Book Club featuring the New York Times best seller, "Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants Manual for Fiscal Years 2026–2027" by the Minnesota Historical Society Grants Office. This in-person and virtual discussion explores the thrilling dynamics of application deadlines, budget narratives, and the mystery of eligible expenses. Dive deep into the symbolism of fiscal responsibility, share favorite footnotes, and debate section headings. Light refreshments and matching highlighters provided. Learn more »

From the Blog

This week's blog post is from the Pioneer Association. Have a blog? Let us know!

The US 250 is for Braggers, Not for Modest Minnesotans
Minnesota has a rich history and has contributed significantly to the history of the United States. From offering the first volunteers to defend the Union at the outbreak of the Civil War, to notable cultural contributions like the Andrews Sisters and the 1995 self-titled Polara album, few states can match Minnesota. 

But what would that get us? Do we want to be lumped in with the braggers on the East Coast? They have the thirteen original colonies, but we are the home of several almost successful campaigns for the presidency. Do we need to brag about that? No. Everyone knows it, and to loudly interpret that history is akin to showing off. Minnesotans have a shared sense of modesty, and this shared trait must carry the day. Continue reading »

From the Tube

Deaccession or Bust!
At the Acme County Museum, we had a preservation crisis that overwhelmed our storage space. Our board couldn't bear to part with 50+ dusty typewriters, a bouquet of rusty scythes, or stacks of mysterious unprovenanced artifacts. We were bursting at the seams so we called in "HOARDERS: Museum Edition" for intervention! Watch video »

Job Opportunities

LOCAL

• Outhouse interpreter - Commode Museum, Kiester, MN

• Short-term contract: Peterson family genealogist - American Swedish Archive, Scandia, MN

• Whistle Curator - Archive of Good Trouble, Minneapolis, MN 

REGIONAL

• Manatee Sighter - Black Hills Whale Watchers, Rapid City, SD

• Collections Manager - Past Due Collections Agency, Ames, IA

• Event Planner - Cannibal Sandwich Museum, Oostburg, WI

NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL

• Gossip Archivist - Johnson Middle School, Poughkeepsie, NY

• Executive Director - Minnesota Snowbird Museum, Pensacola, FL

• Conservator or Conservationist (we’re not sure, what’s the difference?) - Utah Regional Parks, Salt Lake City, UT
• Museum Duster - Flatwater History Center, David City, NB 

Do History Here

Henrich Müller's General Store on Filbert Street in 1893, Passive Grove, MN. Photo colorized and restored with AI.
Image used with permission. From the collections of the Passive Grove Historical Society.

Escape the Past: The Oral History Challenge Escape Room
April 9 @ 6 to 9 pm - Mosquito Bluff: Museum of Perpetual Yesterdays - Locked in a meticulously re-created 1970s basement, participants must decode nostalgic clues while enduring three continuous hours of one man explaining how things were better in his day, racing to escape before the VHS tape ends and they have to rewind it. Patience required. Learn more »

Book Club: The Saint Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald: Review Session
April 20 @ 6:30 to 8 pm – Rapid Falls: Rapid Falls Historical Society – It's test time! Join this session to review your knowledge of the book, The Saint Paul Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Expect a quiz on ambition, young love, and St. Paul high society, along with spirited debate on whether you’ve met your page goals. Cost: Free. Learn more »

Exhibit Opening: 67 Years of Men’s Hockey
April 22 @ 10:30 am - Eveleth: United States Hockey Hall of Fame - Men's hockey is finally getting its moment in the spotlight! Celebrate the opening of 67 Years of Men’s Hockey, a groundbreaking exhibition examining how this little-known pastime has quietly persevered despite the overwhelming global dominance and mass appeal of women's hockey—known to most people simply as Team USA. Through stories, artifacts, and archival footage, visitors will discover the resilience of men who laced up their skates anyway, proving that even without international dominance and unbridled popularity, the boys can still have a great time on the ice. Cost: Free. Learn more »

Architecture Tour Preservation Series: Westdale Shopping Mall 
April 29 @ 6:30 pm - Park Valley: Westdale Shopping Mall - You can still see faint evidence of their past glory in the middle of a huge, empty asphalt parking lot. We’re talking about historic shopping malls, the pillars of late twentieth-century retail commerce. Join the Park Valley Historical Society for a tour of the historic Westdale Shopping Mall. Completed in 1983, today’s visitors can still see ghost signs for KarmelKorn, GNC Nutrition, and Spencer’s Gifts. The tour will start with a fifteen-minute trek across the parking lot to hear stories about shoplifting heists and see where Santa’s Workshop was. Tour goers will have the opportunity to pierce one another’s ear lobes with a piercing gun left from the Claire’s Accessories that closed in 2003, one of the mall’s original tenants. Cost: Free. Learn more » 

Frost Bite Falls Cemetery Tour
May 1 @ 1 pm - Frost Bite Falls Cemetery -  Join the Pottsylvania Historical Society for a cemetery tour at the Frost Bite Falls Cemetery. Step into Mr. Peabody’s WABAC Machine to hear stories of Rocket J. Squirrel, industrial magnate Snidely Whiplash, famous mariner Captain Peter Peachfuzz, and heroic Canadian Mountie Dudley Do-Right as you visit their final resting places. Cost: Free. Learn more » 

Continuing Education

Highlighted Museum: Pioneer Village of Gingerbread, operated by the Nisswa Area Historical Society, Nisswa, MN.
Photograph by McGhiever, distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 license.

Workshop for Octogenarians planning programs for Gen Z/Gen Alpha🔥💡 COOL MUSEUM TIPS 🌟
April 1 @ 2 to 3 pm - St. Paul: MNHS Local History Services - 🤓 Wanna make your old, dusty museum SO LIT for US? 🚀 Here's the tea: Join for a workshop to teach octogenarian board members at local historical societies to get their “rizz” and understand the “vibe” of Generation Alpha. Workshop attendees will learn “epic life hacks” from actual teenagers to show the kids they aren’t so bad. Location: Minnesota History Center. Learn more »

Use Your Lunch to Preserve Your Collections
June 18 @ 9 am to 5 pm -  Minnesota History Center: This full-day course guides participants in repurposing the contents of their lunch bag to clean and care for a museum collection. The class will cover disassembling a PB&J to clean a painting, reusing salad dressing as a leather dressing, and freshening up dull wood furniture with freshly squeezed orange juice. The class is designed especially for institutions that are both frugal and hungry. Lunch not provided.  Learn more »

Tips and Tactics to Eliminate Anonymous Doorstep Donations
June 28 @ 1 to 2 pm (CT) - Online: Local Historical Societies Association of Minnesota - Interactive workshop to learn how to fend off the endless doorstep donations that never produce interesting artifacts for your collection. The bane of collections staff, these boxes of National Geographics and Wheaties boxes depicting the 1987 Minnesota Twins World Series Championship can overwhelm a museum’s resources. Attendees will learn how to set booby traps outside of a museum back door, craft their own cease-and-desist letters, and do a field trip to passively-aggressively leave a box of deaccessioned single-issue newspapers announcing the 1969 moon landing on the front door of suspected anonymous donors. Learn more »

TIPS & TOOLS

• Faking Interest: 5 Ways to Endure a Genealogist’s Great‑Uncle's Beet Farm Tale - Midwest Passive-Aggressive Heritage Society
• Completed Survey of Wedding Dresses in History Museums - American Association of Local History Museums

Funding & Awards

Genius Grants for Museum Volunteers
The MacArthur Volunteer Fellowship honors unsung museum volunteer heroes with a $1 million "no-strings" award for lifetime achievements in gift shop sales, brochure stacking, and enduring school group field trips without visible despair. Nominees must demonstrate genius in tasks like intuitively knowing when a fire alarm is “probably fine.” No applications needed, fellows are selected by a secret panel of emeritus docents who’ve been watching you since orientation. Learn more »

Funding Opportunity: Non‑Fungible Interpretation Initiative (NFII)
Deadline - Whenever the Blockchain Confirms It: National Bureau for Contextual Experiments - This grant funds proposals for NFT‑based exhibit labels that merge interpretive storytelling with crypto scarcity, ensuring that each gallery label achieves marketable singularity. Learn more »

News

Vintage Museum Photo: Payne Avenue Antique Mall, St. Paul, MN (1993). 
This section features slides taken of Minnesota history museums from the 1970s through the 1990s by David Nystuen, the MNHS Field Services Coordinator, and other Field Services representatives during that time period.

Minnesota Announces That the State’s History Quota Has Been Met
Prairie Style Press - No more history of national or international significance is permitted by law to occur in the state. “We’re done, leave us alone,” says Heidi Nylund-Nelson, the chair of the Minnesota Coalition of Allied History Consortiums. “To be clear, we do not have a quota for state history - our extensive network of community history organizations will always have space for local and state-level history,” Ms. Nylund-Nelson wrote via an email sent at 3 am. “But in terms of historical events that put us in the national and international spotlight, even when they include Minnesotans coming together to stand for the essential human rights of life, liberty, and safety, we really need a [expletive] break.” As if to illustrate her point, the Minnesota Historiological Association reports that as of April 1st the lid on Minnesota’s 2025-26 time capsule already will not close. Learn more »

Gilbert and Sullivan
Form & Function Quarterly - Most Minnesotans know Cass Gilbert and Louis Henry Sullivan for their work as trend-setting architects. Gilbert, whose work includes the Minnesota State Capitol, and Louis Henry Sullivan, who is known as the "father of skyscrapers." However, little has been written about their collaborations. The Cass Gilbert Society wants to change that and wants the public to get to know them for their musical side. The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, including H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, and The Mikado. Architectural history may never sound the same again. Learn more »

Downhill Skiing Superstar Lindsey Vonn to donate patella to local history
Burnsville Weekly - Lindsey Vonn is known as one of the best alpine skiers in American history, but she was once a young girl learning to ski on the slopes of Buck Hill. After a long career in one of the most dangerous sports at the Winter Olympics, Vonn is donating her original knee bone to the Dakota County Historical Society in honor of the place where she learned how to ski. Continue reading »

An anonymous benefactor has donated a pair of Ruby Red Crocs to Ripley’s Believe It or Not
Emerald City Bugle - While never seen on-screen in the Wizard of Oz, Judy Garland reportedly wore these clogs during the post-production phase of the movie. According to entertainer Kim Kardashian, “the Crocs fit way better than the Marilyn Monroe dress.” Continue reading »

Another High-Profile Biocontrol Failure
Cat Fancy - Remember the Great Corgi and Silverfish Infestation of 2020? A follow-up by Local History Services reveals that tabby cats may actually outperform both species in keeping storage areas pest-free. Tabby foreheads, marked with the legendary “M” for “Monitoring,” signal their official partnership with “Paw Enforcement.” Their methods are gentle, their claws… less so. To keep silverfish from slinking into your collection of tasty, irreplaceable cellulose, make sure storage doors and handles are secure. For added peace of mind, call a reputable locksmith—perhaps the Lockness Monsters of Blaine. Continue reading » 

Blood on the Tracks... and in Every County
KQRS - The 87 counties of Minnesota are staking claims to pieces of Bob Dylan’s body. Pipestone County commissioner Mike Stand was quoted as saying, “Luckily, Bob has 206 bones, so each county can have at least one tourism-worthy relic.” When reached for comment, Mr. Dylan mumbled, "I’m not dead yet..." Continue reading »

New Cryptocurrency Promises to Revolutionize History Museum Funding
Fast Nonprofit Company - A consortium of museum professionals today announced the launch of PastCoin, the first cryptocurrency designed exclusively for history museums and heritage organizations. The coin can be mined by cataloging uncataloged boxes in storage or by listening politely to donors recount family heirlooms. Continue reading »

Salt and Pepper collection stolen from local museum, Curator says “who cares,” doesn’t file police report
Harold County Herald - 500-item salt and pepper shaker collection stolen from the Harold County Historical Society. Grateful curator declines to file police report. Continue reading »

Thank you!

We hope you have enjoyed the 2026 April Fool's Day Edition of the Local History News 
Please feel free to look at archived April Fool's Day Editions from past years.

• 2015 Local History News April Fools Day Edition

• 2020 Local History News April Fools Day Edition 

Watch your email for our regular Local History News for April 1st, which will be coming to your inbox soon. 

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