“Everyone Can Come and Remember”: History and Heritage at the Ulen Museum

The building is 40 × 100 ft. Beige corrugated metal siding with a brown roof. There’s a Viking, sans horns for historical accuracy, staring back at you as you walk to the front door featuring a beautifully rosemaled panel. Between May and October, the museum is open from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. There’s a list of names and phone numbers posted in the window, in case anyone comes by and wants a tour while the museum is closed. All you have to do is call (Holman 2017). Admission is deliberately low: adults are asked to pay $3, senior citizens $2, and students $1. Children under the age of six are free (Holman 2016). The museum, operated entirely by volunteers, needs to encourage visitors; it celebrates a town whose population has never climbed above 600. Volunteers don’t keep a count, but based on the guestbook, approximately 300 people visit the Ulen Museum every season, many of them from Ulen, including students from the local public school. The annual fall festival, known as Turkey BBQ Day and held every year since 1961, is the museum’s biggest day. Hosted by Ulen Civic & Commerce, the festival attracts citizens from Ulen and the surrounding towns, and people who have moved away return for high school reunions and the annual festivities, which include a parade and a spit made of cinder blocks that is long enough to barbecue over 100 turkeys.

In 1965, members of the local historical society founded this museum, celebrating Ulen’s history and heritage—including a sword, largely recognized at the time as a Viking artifact. The museum moved to its current location in 2007, and, although today it recognizes the sword as a nineteenth-century artifact, the museum still continues to be a repository for historical objects, a marker of civic engagement and accomplishment, and a meeting place for community members. The museum is run by the Ulen Historical Society and thus has no paid staff.

Fig. 1.

The Ulen Museum decorated for the annual Turkey BBQ Day in Ulen, Minnesota, in August of 2017 (photos by B. Marcus Cederström, Mirva Johnson, and David Natvig).

Examining the development of the museum in town, from the Ulen Historical Museum to the Viking Sword Museum to the Ulen Museum, while conducting ethnographic fieldwork with the volunteers who run the organization, allows us to better understand the ways in which heritage and history are created and presented at museums. Similar themes have been explored elsewhere by, among others, Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (1991), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), Barbro Klein (2000), Ivan Karp et al. (2006), and Peter Aronsson and Lizette Gradén (2013).

Ulen Museum’s volunteers actively take part in the creation and negotiation of history and heritage through their decisions, both by creating and maintaining the museum. These volunteers determine what is preserved and how it is remembered, and in turn take control of how their stories are told. This is why small-town museums are important to discussions about heritage creation and in the field of folklore studies. In founding and maintaining a museum, community members exercise their voice, and the institution legitimizes the town: Ulen’s heritage matters, Ulen’s history matters, Ulen matters. The Ulen Museum is a place of pride, not necessarily because of what’s in there, but because it’s there.

Ulen’s History and Heritage

Ulen is a small agricultural town on the prairie of western Minnesota in Clay County, located about 40 miles east of Fargo, North Dakota. The town was incorporated in 1886, 15 years after its first white settler, Ole Ulen, arrived in the area. By that time, Europeans, many from Scandinavia, had already colonized land that had long been occupied by the Dakota and Ojibwe. The White Earth Reservation, home to the Chippewa of the White Earth Nation, had been formed in 1867 (White Earth Nation, n.d.).¹ At the time of...