Stearns County, Minnesota

Oh, the joy of local history!

Lately, I've been purposely working less (it's hard to say "retire"), and using some of those spare hours volunteering at the Stearns History Museum in St Cloud. This is all Larry's fault ☺.  When you click the link, you'll see on the right side: "Research Center Online Catalog, Click Here"  (Ok, click there, too). If you type something into the search box, say SAND, you'll get a list of photo descriptions, but only a few photos are actually attached.  This drives me crazy--over 500,000 photos in the collection?  Someone needs to devote herself to scanning.  And that, my friends, is ME.  I've done about 260 of em so far, starting with the "other" towns by choice (not St Cloud).  So, Albany and Avon folders called "General", "Businesses" and "Families" are done, and Belgrade is started.  It's fascinating!  One's curiosity gets involved:
One of the long-ago businesses in Belgrade was a general & dry goods store owned by T J Anderson (See the Wilmar Tribune of May 28, 1895).  If the top left corner ad was T J s, then he was a moralist as well as a store owner. Belgrade News is in the next column.

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Stearns County

When I first tried Chronicling America this morning, the search term "Belgrade" in Minnesota newspapers got over four thousand hits.  "Belgrade, Servia" was very much in the news in 1914-1915 because of WWI, and also in 1903, with the assassinations of King Alexander and Queen Draga of Servia.  Most of the news from "our" Belgrade shows up as endless descriptions of ballgames and a few paragraphs of local news, mostly in the 1890s and the 1920s. It tickles me that I already recognize the names Mikkelson, and R J Skimland (a blacksmith), and the Christianson Hotel, from the scary accident account in this article from July 10, 1901.
Something else I learned from the Wilmar newspaper: the plethora of towns they reported on, like Arctander, Burbank, Sven, Ringville, Roseland, Salem, Colfax.  Some might still be towns that I just never heard of, right?