In 1907, the state legislature passed a bill that designated Itasca State Park as a State Forest and assigned Park management to the state Forestry Board. The legislature also granted the Board of Regents of the University of Minnesota permission…
On the cover page of each Annual Report of The Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, a list of the “Officers of the Survey” is printed. The first year, the only name that appears is that of State Geologist…
When we began scanning the Ned L. Huff Lantern Slide Collection a few months ago, we had very little knowledge of just who Ned Huff was other than that he was a botany professor at the University. Ned was…
As we shared in a blog post a few months ago, the University’s “General Museum” – the museum established by the 1872 act that created the state Geological and Natural History Survey – started humbly. It wasn’t until three years…
In the Annals of the Museum of Natural History 1872-1939, Thomas Sadler Roberts, museum director, listed the following entry for January 20, 1928 on a detailed timeline of museum activities and milestones: An original double elephant folio edition of John…
We previously shared the story of how the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey started. The Board of Regents, charged by the state legislature to implement the Survey, hired Newton Horace Winchell to lead field explorations and serve as the…
In addition to mandating an exhaustive study of the geological, botanical, and zoological phenomena of the state, the March 1, 1872 law that created the Minnesota Geological and Natural History Survey under the authority of the Board of Regents of…
On March 1, 1872 the legislature of the state of Minnesota approved a bill that ordered the commencement of a geological and natural history survey of the state, to be implemented and overseen by the Board of Regents of the…