(soft music) - Just because we're a small rural county doesn't mean important things don't happen here.

(upbeat music) Grant County was formed in 1868.

It was pardoned, pieced off from Stevens County at the time.

It was finally organized in 1873.

The towns in Grant County include Elbow Lake, the county seat, Herman, which was the first community settled, Hoffman, Barrett, Wendell, Ashby, Norcross, and Erdahl, which is an unincorporated village.

The Historical Society started in 1938.

In the 40s, the Historical Society received the bequeath of a farm, and using income that they received from that farm, in 1958 they decided to build a museum.

In 1959 this plot of land was given to the Historical Society by the city of Elbow Lake, and the museum was built in 1959, and it wasn't until September of 1961 when it was actually open to the public.

(light music) The artifacts here kind of cover prehistoric times to even with the more modern era, with the uniforms and things from the most recent conflicts, Afghanistan, Iraq, and those conflicts.

But 1880s to 1940s is probably the predominant eras that we cover here.

The prehistoric includes mammoth bones, pre-contact Indian artifacts, the pioneer times, pioneer household goods, transportation items, buggies, sleighs, wagons, old vehicles, and things like that, and farm machinery and tools.

The ox cart, of course, is one of our favorite artifacts that we have here.

The ox cart is the oldest and crudest ox cart known to exist in the state of Minnesota.

The one-room schoolhouse was brought over in 1971.

It was located between Elbow Lake and Ashby, and it gives us an example of what the one-room schoolhouse were like that were scattered throughout the county.

I also really like the model of Fort Pomme de Terre that we have in the Veterans Hall showing what the fort looked like back in the 1860s when it was there.

(patriotic music) The Veterans Hall was added in 2007, 2008.

We had military items kind of scattered here and there in different cases throughout the museum, but no one place for a good exhibit.

We decided to go to the Elbow Lake Legion to get some advice on how could we display this.

The Legion had some money stocked away, and they thought that a good investment would be adding on to our museum.

It's just been a great addition.

People are very impressed with it.

Veterans especially really like it.

(light music) People have gotten more curious as to where their ancestors came from.

Our museum was one of the early ones recognizing genealogy and the popularity of it before it was even popular.

Back in the 70s and 80s, they had volunteers going through the newspapers and making up card files with the obituaries and the marriages.

We have all the county newspapers, mostly the Grant County Herald, Herman Review, Hoffman Tribune.

We also have most of those on microfilm, so they get used a lot with people doing genealogy.

We have a number of photographs, boxes of photographs.

I get comments that all the time that we have just a wonderful museum, but one of the things I hear a lot is they didn't realize how big it was when they first walked in because when you see it from the highway, you just see the front of it.

It doesn't look like it would be that big, not realizing that it goes all the way down the whole block.

So they're impressed with the size of it and just what we have.

(upbeat music) I hope people will come away with a sense of what the history is for Grand County, and how people lived, and how hard it was too, a little bit for the people that lived during the early years.

It's important that people learn history, and so they can learn from history and realize that things aren't as easy as they were, as they are now for them.

They're not growing up in a time where you didn't have electricity in the house or a bathroom in the house.

It's important that they learn it so they can appreciate what they have.

(upbeat music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the Vote of the People of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.