With all the news surrounding the SS William A. Irvin moving out and back into the Minnesota Slip in 2018 and 2019, we take a moment here to look at William A. Irvin, the man. The brief bio below appeared in the March 28, 1932 issue of the Billings Gazette of Billings, Mont.
This image from Detroit Publishing Company shows the Great Lakes freighter Augustus B. Wolvin on Lake Superior at Duluth. The vessel was built for the Acme Steamship Company of Duluth and launched April 9, 1904. The Library of Congress dates the image above as “between 1904 and 1910.”
The postmark on the card above is difficult to read, but it appears to have been mailed in March of 1916. It depicts the State Normal School at Duluth, which later became the State Teachers College and then the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Old Main building.
Test your knowledge of local history with this week’s quiz on Hunters Park, the second installment in a series of quizzes focusing on Twin Ports neighborhoods. The first was on the history of Morgan Park. Sound off in the comments on which neighborhoods you’d like to see featured in a future quiz.
Zenith City Press and the Northeast Minnesota Historical Collections of UMD’s Kathryn A. Martin Library were invaluable sources of content for this quiz. Many of the maps and images from the quiz were accessed through Minnesota Reflections; check it out for even more historical content.
The next PDD quiz, reviewing headlines and happenings from this month, will be published on Oct. 27. Please submit question suggestions to Alison Moffat at [email protected] by Oct. 24.
Demolition work on the Amendola Building in Downtown Duluth. (Photo by Mike Creger)
The Amendola Building at 405 E. Superior St. was demolished today to make way for Essentia Health’s Vision Northland project.
Amendola Building, Google Maps, 2018
It’s Homecoming Weekend at the University of Minnesota Duluth, and in the spirit of that we roll out this relic from 1947, supplied by Kristy Roschke, managing director of the News Co/Lab at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. The photo is of her grandparents, Dan and Joanne Devine, partaking in homecoming festivities at UMD. Joanne was homecoming queen; Dan was captain of the football and basketball teams.
The adventure drama Iron Will premiered on Jan. 14, 1994. Much of the film was shot in Duluth and areas near Duluth from Jan. 11 to April 1, 1993. The annotations below are a guide to spotting familiar people and locations.
This postcard of the passenger and delivery ship America is from some point between 1902, when the Booth Steamship Line acquired the vessel, and 1928, when it sunk near Isle Royale.
More info about the vessel can be found in two other Perfect Duluth Day posts — “SS America, 1925” and “Remembering America and her life on the water.”
This photo is labeled “Early Settler Duluth MN.” And that’s all we know. Who is this dude?
It’s not known who scrawled a date on this postcard, when it was scrawled, or what the date is supposed to represent. But the date is one century ago today — Oct. 5, 1919.
It could represent the date the photo was shot, but that seems unlikely. The date was probably written by someone who bought the postcard and wanted to remember the date of a visit to that spot.
The trivia cards featured in this series were purchased at a local thrift store. Accuracy might be off. Note, for example, the spelling of Bernick’s on the header on the card below. Bernick’s, of course, has been the Duluth-area distributor of Pepsi and other beverage products since the 1970s.
While John Wilkes Booth remains infamous as the actor who assassinated Abraham Lincoln, his older brother Edwin was actually the better known of the two prior to Lincoln’s assassination as he was considered one of the greatest Shakespearean performers of the 19th century. Edwin Booth feared that his brother’s crime would destroy his own reputation and career even though he was not only a supporter of Lincoln, but also once saved the life of Lincoln’s son by grabbing him as he fell from a train. Edwin Booth’s open expression of horror at what his brother had done led to continued public support after Lincoln’s assassination and he remained a successful actor until his death. To this day, no actor has performed the role of Hamlet more times than him.
