BRITTA BLOOMBERG Narrator

DENNIS GIMMESTAD Interviewer

BRITTA BLOOMBERG Narrator

DENNIS GIMMESTAD Interviewer

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writing from the Oral History Office, Minnesota Historical Society, Saint Paul, Minnesota 55102.

THE INTERVIEW  

 

 

6

Britta Bloomberg

Narrator

Dennis Gimmestad

Interviewer

May 14, 2012 and May 21, 2012

Saint Louis Park, Minnesota

Dennis Gimmestad -DG

Britta Bloomberg -BB

DG: My name is Dennis Gimmestad, and I’m interviewing Britta Bloomberg at her home on

Park Commons Drive in Saint Louis Park. Our interview today focuses on Britta Bloomberg’s

career in historic preservation and local history at the Minnesota Historical Society, a career that

began with a position on the State Historic Preservation Office’s historic sites survey team from

1979 to 1981. Britta returned to the society in 1989 and served as Deputy State Historic

Preservation Officer and department head of historic preservation, field services, and grants from

1991 until her recent retirement in early 2012. Your interviewer was a colleague of Britta’s in the

State Historic Preservation Office. In this interview the State Historic Preservation Office may be

referred to as “SHPO.”

BB: Right. Probably often.

DG: OK. Historic preservation and local history are interdisciplinary fields in public history, and

people come to this work through very personal academic and professional backgrounds. When

you were growing up, what did you want to become as an adult?

BB: Oh, that’s a really good question. [Chuckles] I think I wanted to do something that would

make a difference and I had a love of history, so it was a pretty natural choice when I entered

Carleton to become a history major, and I think it was really at Carleton when I was studying

under Cliff Clark, who was my advisor, and my emphasis was in American history. Cliff brought

perspective to his classroom that really put validity in kind of three-dimensional history, if you

will. So, we looked not only at the written documents, but we would look at slides of buildings

and furniture and art work and other kinds of documents as a way to find other lenses into

understanding history, and I was really intrigued by that approach. So, I started thinking more

about if there might be some way to get involved in public history. I didn’t have any desire to

really be a teacher of history. I had the opportunity the summer between my junior and senior

year, 1976, to go out to Historic Deerfield, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, as a summer fellow. This

is a… they have a wonderful undergraduate program in history and material culture, and that was

one of the really instrumental summers in choosing my career path. There I was exposed to some

really wonderful collections and we had wonderful tutors that helped us understand historic

architecture and material culture in general. We had opportunities to go behind the scenes at

places like Winter Tour and Williamsburg, many places along the East Coast, and that was a

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great experience for me. I ended up using my research project that I did that summer in Deerfield

as the basis for my senior history comprehensive paper at Carleton my senior year, in which I

looked really closely at the history of the neighboring town to Deerfield, Greenfield, and how it

developed. So, I was looking really intensively at local history and got really excited by what

you could do with that. One of the things that had newly come into the collection at Historic

Deerfield was the diary of the minister in the neighboring town of Greenfield, and that was a

document that hadn’t ever been really studied by anyone. Someone had found it in their attic and

brought it in. So, it gave me an opportunity to really get into using primary source materials as a

lens to look at community development and I got very inspired by that. So, I came back from

Deerfield and finished up at Carleton, and the summer following my senior year at Carleton I

applied for an internship with the National Trust for Historic Preservation. At the time they had a

program that placed student interns in every state in the nation and I landed the position in

Minnesota and they placed me in the city of Red Wing to do a historic resource survey of

residential neighborhoods in Red Wing. So that I did the summer of 1977.The other thing I did

during that senior year, 1977, was that it was at the time that my parents were just beginning the

restoration of the Saint James Hotel for the Sweezey family, and they needed someone to really

delve into the history of the Saint James Hotel. So, as an independent study under Cliff Clark’s

guidance, I also did a research project that I received credit for, documenting the history of the

Saint James Hotel, locating whatever photographs I could find, maps—all of those components

that have become now so familiar in our work in preservation. So, those were kind of

foundational to my… leading me to MHS and applying for the job in the SHPO office.

DG: It sounds like you had a lot of exposure to material culture resources and questions and just

general methodology kinds of considerations all the way through that experience.

BB: Um hum, I did.

DG: So you made the connection to material culture through your interest in history quite easily.

BB: Right.

DG: With that kind of opportunity.

BB: The other thing—at the time when I was first starting in history at Carleton, social history

was really pretty new in the field of history. I remember they called it the “new” social history.

Now we don’t think of it as new at all, but understanding the history of everyday folks. Another

interest of mine was the history of women. Again, because they were really not documented, so

looking at their homes and kitchens and where they did their work in the household, how they

lived their lives—those were the kinds of things that we really examined when I was a student

out in Deerfield. How did women participate in the local economy in a community like

Deerfield? And what can you learn about how they worked and how their families lived by the

kinds of buildings that they lived in?

DG: That was a pretty exciting time.

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BB: Yeah. It really was, so that it was—yeah, it was a great experience, and I always thought

that it really prepared me well for my work at MHS. I think the other piece of that is, you know, I

mentioned that my parents were involved in the Saint James Hotel project, so certainly even long

before I was pursuing history as a student I had been dragged through countless historic

buildings, and we never left a historic building without examining the way it was built, from the

basement up. I can remember many a vacation where I was my father’s personal photographer

because he didn’t have his camera with him, or I would be taking pictures of a particular joist or

a pattern in the floor or a stained glass window. Some design feature that had caught his eye and

he wanted to record. So, I think that very much also contributed to my interest in pursuit of the

career that I chose.

DG: Tell us some more about where you grew up and some of your childhood memories.

BB: I grew up in Chanhassen, and my parents were very creative people. My dad had been

building homes since he was fourteen years old. He designed and built his first home with his

father in Oakes, North Dakota, and he went into business with his father and brother, building

homes all over south Minneapolis and, a little later, Edina, and my dad—my uncle broke off

from that, and my dad remained in business with my grandfather until my grandfather retired.

So, that really became the foundation of Bloomberg Companies, which remains our family

business. My mother was an interior designer and so—a very keen sense of design and artistic

expression. They were the founders of the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre and that, too, I think

was… had a shaping effect on the way that we were raised and the lenses through which we saw

the world. There was something magical about growing up in a theatre environment, whether it

was just the way you could make a story come alive—history’s all about story, and theatre’s all

about story, so there are lots of connections there. While I grew up in Chanhassen, I also had the

opportunity to… I attended boarding school out in Arizona and I think that was another,

probably, building block to this whole tapestry of experience. One of the… there were two things

that I think are particularly meaningful from my experience at the school—it’s called the Orme

School. It’s about halfway between Phoenix and Flagstaff on a large working cattle ranch. But I,

when I was at Orme, I had two experiences that were extremely important, I think. One was that

I studied anthropology, and we actually had an opportunity to work with archeologists from the

University of Arizona in Tucson on an excavation on our campus. We were looking… we were

doing a Sinagua Indian site dating to about 1200, kind of a transitional area, and that was a great

experience. I actually, when I first entered Carleton, I thought I might pursue anthropology or

archeology because of that interest from my Orme days. After I got to Carleton I took one

summer of archeology. Carleton at the time had a summer archeological institute and actually

Christina Harrison taught that. There were four students. I was in that particular course the

summer after my freshman year, so I worked on the Silvernail site outside of Red Wing that

summer. So I had some archeological experience as well. While that wasn’t, certainly, the area

that I pursued in greater depth, there was a foundation there. And then the other piece at Orme

that I think was really important to my work at the Historical Society is… one of the really rich

experiences that the school offered was an opportunity to have a home stay experience with

American Indians in the Southwest. I spent a couple weeks my senior year living on the Navaho

Reservation with a wonderful woman by the name of Mrs. One Salt and her family. There were

fourteen of us that lived in a one-room cement block house—this is before there was electricity

or running water on the reservation. It gave me, I think, a real valuable insight into the richness

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of our native culture here in the US, and, certainly, a great respect for Indian people. One of the

things that I certainly enjoyed in my years at MHS was the many opportunities we had to interact

with Indian people, particularly in the preservation office, where many times the tribes were

more passionate about the resources than everyone else was. I think that was, again, something

that contributed to the tapestry, I might call it, of experiences that kind of led me to MHS.

DG: Tell me a little bit more about the sorts of projects that your father built.

BB: He’s best known for the large projects that have a lot of visibility: The Chanhassen Dinner

Theatre, the Old Log Theatre, certainly the Saint James Hotel. He built Minnesund, which is the

retreat of the Carlson family, up in Wisconsin, on the Brule River. He built the swimming pool at

Courage Center. He did—my mind is going blank here …

DG: Some of his housing work?

BB: I was saying that he was best known for those big things, but I think when I think of his

career, where I think he really made the most significant mark, when it comes to building—it’s

his residential building. He built scores and scores of homes, developed entire neighborhoods in

places like Edina. One of the things I’m working on, now that I have a little more time, is trying

to catalog the many, many architectural drawings that I have of his, and at some point, hopefully,

will find an appropriate repository for them. But, he was known for, I think, the quality of the

finishing work, in particular. He was also known for not building very many square rooms. He

had a way of having interesting angles and he was actually greatly influenced by Frank Lloyd

Wright. He liked to make his buildings blend in with the landscape. He tended to build on a more

horizontal plane and things fit into the landscape. Even his early works, when he would be doing

a pretty traditional Colonial house that might go up in Edina, it had characteristics that were

distinctly my father, whether it was the paneling or the kitchen cabinets, the fireplace work—he

used very fine craftsmen in completing those jobs. He built the home we lived in for almost fifty

years. It was a really unique house. He was also known for indoor swimming pools. He found

them—I always thought this was kind of hilarious—he just found them very practical. That’s not

a word I would use on an indoor swimming pool, but Dad found them so practical [chuckles]

because you could just dive in.

DG: It sounds like in the mid-twentieth century that your life intersected in a lot of different

themes. I mean, in one sense you lived in an emerging suburb. Your father was developing a lot

of housing that was very mid-twentieth century, in terms of the suburbanization of the Twin

Cities area, but yet through that you have a strain of personal experience with history.

BB: Um hum.

DG: So, it sounds like you were touching a lot of the themes of sort of the urban fabric in the

mid-twentieth century, is that part of it?

BB: I think that’s definitely true. And, you know, my dad’s building—he ended up developing

the land as well. It’s not… he wasn’t your typical contractor who simply is building houses, but

he was out there laying out the roads. I look at the way that development happens today and I

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think it’s a good thing my father lived when he did, before the kinds of approvals and

environmental laws were in effect that are today. They would have driven him crazy. [Chuckles]

I remember when he was laying out our neighborhood in Chanhassen. He just rode up on the seat

with the guy that was driving the big earth mover and said—Let’s make a bend here… and it had

nothing to do with anything else. It wasn’t necessarily drawn on a map first. He let the roads

bend with the landscape, where it tended to bend naturally, and he’d also bend to save a few

trees.

DG: So that was quite a period in terms of your early childhood all the way through your

elementary school …

BB: Um hum.

DG: And into your collegiate years, with some threads of interest in material culture and history,

kind of brought together.

BB: Well, I think a part of me… my parents had been so active in so many things, and they

always wanted us kids to work with them. It’s kind of ironic, but I wanted to—I really wanted to

make my own mark, so I was really intentional about trying to find a career path that would be

my career path. I remember thinking I’d found it, and then my parents got the job to do the Saint

James Hotel, and I thought, well, so much for that, [chuckles] because it was my interest that got

them interested in pursuing historic preservation more seriously. Dad did… that was really the

only serious preservation project he did. My mom did some other pretty serious interior designs

on historic buildings. She did some down in Rockford, Illinois and some other places as well, but

I always thought that was rather humorous.

DG: So, your parents’ involvement in the Saint James Hotel came from the summer you spent

there?

BB: Well, no—they were involved before that. Their involvement with the Saint James Hotel

really had nothing to do with me, but it was more because they knew the Sweezey family, and

they had done other work for the Sweezeys. They’d done work for them on their house on Fourth

Street, and they’d built for them… my dad had done the new building for the Red Wing Shoe

Company. He had done some of these other jobs, and so they knew my dad’s work. But, I’d been

at Deerfield about the time that was all unfolding, and so, they just thought it was so perfect that

I was interested in this, too.

DG: Um hum.

BB: Well, in fact, the summer that I was down in Red Wing as an intern with the National Trust

was the summer they started the Saint James project, the actual construction, and I lived in the

hotel that summer. I was able to… I lived up on the third floor, and it was quite the experience. I

was the last resident in the Saint James Hotel before they closed it for the restoration.

DG: So that was after your graduation from Carleton.

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BB: Yeah.

DG: And what else did you do between the time you were at Carleton and when you came to the

society?

BB: I spent several months out in northern California and I was… that was kind of my

declaration of independence. I wanted to do something totally different, and I had a friend who

was still finishing school out there, so I went and roomed with her and did research on hotels,

hotel restorations. So, I gathered a lot of information for my dad and traveled around, whether it

was the Gold Country hotels or San Francisco, or along the coast up near Mendocino… but

because we were working on the Saint James, I was very much in their mind and they were

trying to resource some special things for the project, so that was something I kind of did while I

was being a little rebellious.[chuckles] And then when I came back I actually applied for a job

that I didn’t get at MHS, earlier that year, and it was actually the job I later did get, but I wasn’t

hired in the first round, and so then I also spent a semester at the University of Minnesota, trying

to decide if I really wanted to be serious about graduate school or not.

DG: And that led to your application for the job that you were hired for?

BB: That’s right.

DG: And that particular assignment was part of the effort to survey the state. The State

Historical Preservation Office at that point had begun a county-by-county survey. Tell us a little

bit about that work, when you started at the society. Tell us a little bit about the counties you

worked in; tell us when you were …

BB: Sure, and when I stared at the society, my first assignment was actually a six-month

temporary job, and I was hired to finish the survey of Red Wing. Goodhue County had been

surveyed by Michael Zuckerman, but he had not done the city of Red Wing. So, I was hired in

the six-month block of time to survey the city of Red Wing and one other county. And the one

other county I was assigned for that period was Scott County. I think I was the choice for that

particular temporary hire because of my familiarity with Red Wing. So, my summer in Red

Wing, my previous survey work in Red Wing, certainly equipped me for filling that particular

position. The thing I remember when I was hired for that job, though, is—here was a six-month

temporary job, and I had three interviews. I interviewed first with Charles Skrief, and then I

interviewed with Donn Coddington, and then I interviewed with Nina Archibal—before they

hired me for six months! [chuckles] And I remember thinking—this is a little overdoing it.

[Chuckles] Now we don’t have that kind of rigor on a six-month temporary position. [Chuckles]

But, it was a lot of fun to go back to Red Wing after having immersed myself in it, so finishing

the Red Wing survey was… I already knew most of the community, but I was surveying the

entire city, not just the west residential neighborhood this time, and so it was fun to delve into

other resources and look at properties like the Red Wing Pottery and some of the more industrial-

type structures that I hadn’t really done much with up to that point. There were also houses like

the… people like Frances Densmore and some really rich characters in Minnesota history, who

had been prominent in Red Wing, and it was great to find places that had associations with those

people, whether they were in the historic district or whether they were individual properties.

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After the Red Wing survey was done we had actually a pretty robust list of nominations. The

largest nomination I did in that particular survey was the Red Wing Mall district, which was a

fascinating district to work on, with its mix. The thing I remember, and it still stands out to me, is

that the plat for that town is so interesting, the way that kind of wedged-shape mall really divides

commercial and residential and is kind of set aside for a lot of those public functions—court

houses and churches and parks. Hamline and Gustavus had both been founded in Red Wing, so

all of those things were part of the Red Wing story, which was really rich.

Scott County was a real challenge in contrast. Here’s Red Wing, so rich and everything

screaming to be listed on the National Register. Scott County was another story, particularly

towns like Shakopee, which were really [hard for the wear] and… but it was a great experience

in that, again, it was familiar to me. I knew the geography, having grown up just a few miles

across the river. I’d driven through Scott County all my life, so I was familiar with the resources,

even though I didn’t necessarily know the history of that county. What was interesting, I think,

though, is that all of us were new at it. There were six of us on the survey staff at the time, and

we were trying to figure out how we do this. Minnesota has eighty-seven counties. If you are

going to do a city and a county in six months it’s going to take a long time to get all eighty-seven

done.

DG: Talk a little bit about how the survey got organized.

BB: The survey was organized—each surveyor would be assigned counties and we kind of…

after awhile there seemed to be kind of a pattern in the kinds of counties we would be assigned. I

was attracted to river counties and counties that had Swedish heritage. Susan liked the prairie.

Tom Harvey wanted to go way northwest. He liked the railroad. I remember your interest with

the agricultural, kind of that midsection—so there was some of that, but then as part of this we

had to have some consistency across the state, and the instrument we used was really devised by

the National Park Service, in that we were looking at counties as kind of a defined region. We

would do our nominations—once we did the survey we would come up with a list of

nominations, or a list of properties we wanted to recommend for a listing, and we would write

that up in the form of a multiple resource area nomination. So, we were looking kind of region-

wide. The county made sense, because it was a subdivision of Minnesota government that had

some logic to it. It wasn’t perfect. Every bit of history doesn’t stop at the county line, but

certainly there are themes and patterns in a county’s history that make sense. And I think in the

period of time we were doing it, in the late 70s, if you look back fifty years, most of what we

were looking at had to be at least fifty years old. So, we were still looking at a history of this

state that was largely agricultural, and so I think the county division made a lot of sense,

particularly at that time, and it’s something that was consistent across the whole state. So, you

had the rural school system, you had townships and just the way the roads were laid out and the

way that the railroads kind of unfolded over time.

DG: How did your background in material culture help you sort out what the important themes

were or what you wanted to focus on when you were dealing with an area as large as a county?

BB: I’d kind of look at what the themes were, and then I’d try to—now it’s so intuitive, it’s

almost second nature. [Chuckles] It’s hard to think about it in those terms. I think about what the

13

themes of the county’s history are, and then what the built environment is that somehow reflects

those themes. Maybe an example would be—one time I was getting ready for a public meeting

out in some county. I think it was up near Detroit Lakes or some place, and I had a radio reporter

call me and wanted to do an interview with me. They said—Well, what do we have that’s

historic up here? You know, that kind of question. I didn’t have a whole lot of time to prepare, I

probably, in hindsight, should have said let me call you back, but all I did was I pulled out our

checklist of National Register properties and turned to the county that they’re in, and I told them

the story of their county just by what buildings were listed in the checklist, and I could talk about

the tourist industry, I could talk about the railroad and how the county developed, I could talk

about the lakes. And, you know, after about five minutes, all of a sudden I had their attention.

And that’s kind of how all of that folds together, because the built environment in our

communities really is kind of a living document that tells the story of the place. Those walls

really do talk. You just have to learn how to listen.

DG: Quite different than exclusively architectural approach…

BB: Yeah, definitely.

DG: Which I think many surveys in that period were taking.

BB: Yes. Yeah. I think that was probably one of my bents. I wasn’t looking at just the

architecture, I really was looking for the more common properties as reflections of the history of

the area as well. I learned a lot about architecture along the way and certainly your eye is always

drawn to fine architecture. But I had not been an architectural historian by any stretch of the

imagination. I had taken some art history, certainly learned… had a working vocabulary of it, but

it was not the discipline that, really, I approached it from.

DG: How about the day-to-day work of survey? Describe a little bit about how that evolved as

you were working through a county.

BB: You know, you’d start by—I’ll never forget when I was first starting out in Scott County,

I’d set up all these interviews with various local informants, thinking I’d get useful information,

and I realized after about the second one they were telling me about places that were long gone.

They’d say—Well, there’s the old… you know, whatever, and I’d be out in my car, tooling along

the road and thinking the old whatever, the old mill’s not here anymore. What are you talking

about? [chuckles] In their minds the history was what had been there before. They weren’t

thinking about what was still present as being very meaningful at all. So, local informants

weren’t the best place to start. They were useful after you had panned the whole area and had

better prepared questions for them, rather than just sending you off on wild goose chases. But,

some of what we had to wrestle with was—counties are huge! How do you decide what roads to

cover. You can’t cover every single road in every single county. You aren’t going to research

every building that’s more than fifty years old within that particular area, or particular region. So,

what we… the strategy—and I think it was pretty consistent among most of us—I can’t say it’s

100 percent, but I would at least cover every road of every town, so I made sure I drove up and

down every single street in every community that I surveyed. And I would do a sampling of

county roads, but to figure out what county roads I would sample is I would look at older

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highway maps to find where more of the development had been. I made sure my route would

make sure that I went to every non-farm structure that was located on the county highway maps,

so I managed to see every school or church, anything like that that would be showing on the

map. We had some information in our files from earlier surveys that had been pretty haphazard.

There hadn’t really been a methodology, but there had been some prior work done earlier in the

‘70s. And we had some things that had been sent in from members of the public, so I made sure

that I would visit those as well. And then, sometimes I would, in looking at the secondary

sources, I would know about some theme in a community’s history or a county’s history and

think—is there anything that reflects that theme that’s still standing. So, if it had to do, say, in a

community like Red Wing, where you know the pottery industry was so significant and you’d

look for those kinds of resources, and some of that would be looking through city directories or

newspapers or whatever source might lead you there. You don’t always know that the building

on the outside is what it really represents. So, it really is a combination of doing that research and

sampling. So, you’re both leaning on a trained eye as well as the historical research, in

combination with your local informants.

DG: Was it daunting to cover an entire county in a few months?

BB: Sometimes. [Chuckles] It was a lot of ter[ritory]. It depended, I think, on the density of what

you were dealing with. I had some pretty dense—when it comes to historic fabric—dense

counties. You asked earlier what counties I had surveyed. I started out surveying Red Wing and

Scott County. My second assignment was Chisago and Isanti Counties, just north. There, the

counties were more sparsely settled. Rich Swedish heritage. Isanti County only had three towns

in it, really. So… but really rich assortment of resources in the rural areas. Different kinds of

resources. Small Swedish churches, and I remember a Grange Hall, certainly rural schools and

kind of the whole range of resources that we would encounter. It was in Scott County that I…

was it Scott County, or was it …? Now they’re running together. LeSueur County. I did LeSueur

County also. I’m trying to think where that bridge was—was it Scott or LeSueur? I can’t

remember. Rice County, I did. I did Waseca and McLeod County the last season, but didn’t get

to finish those counties because we were laid off. I’m trying to think if I’m missing any counties.

There were a few random nominations I did. I remember doing the Taylor House down in Sibley

County for the Sibley County Historical Society. I also did the Saint Hubert’s Church out in

Chanhassen, where local groups really wanted to have some nominations completed for these

properties, so any number of us would be tapped on the shoulder occasionally to pick up an

individual nomination like that. The nominations that we did back then were very different than

what they would be today. [Chuckles] The multiple resource nomination approach really wanted

you to package this in a succinct way that was kind of what was being kind of hammered home.

In fact, I remember, halfway through writing our first batch of nominations, we received word

from Washington that nominations had to be one paragraph long now, because they were too

much to review. Now the thought of writing a one-paragraph nomination is amazing. So, there’s

that little disclaimer on a lot of those early nominations saying this was prepared prior to the

requirement for one paragraph. Fortunately, they still got listed, but…

DG: And that process, of course, involved meetings with the State Review Board.

BB: Right.

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DG: Maybe you can talk a little bit about those meetings during that period and how they might

have been a bit different than more recently.

BB: They were definitely different back then. The State Review Board, back when we were

doing the county-wide survey, met monthly, which, to me, is hard to imagine now. After having

now been many years when they were meeting three times or four times a year at the most. And

they would hear nominations for a couple counties in their monthly meetings. Usually… I don’t

know how many nominations there would be. Easily they could be looking at thirty, forty

nominations a night. The surveyor who had prepared the nominations would present them. They

were held in the Weyerhaeuser Room at 640 Cedar Street. They were kind of a big deal.

Everybody was there. I remember Russell and Nina and John Wood and Donn Coddington

would all be there, as well as the members of the board, and there was a fair… they would be

fairly well attended. I can’t remember any review board meetings that didn’t have people from

the public attending, back then. Our survey strategy and our kind of whole approach, doing the

countywide survey, was also to make sure we were sending out news releases and coordinating

with the local county historical society, if there was one, and so we had that kind of body of

support as well.

DG: You alluded to this a little bit earlier, but since the whole State Historical Preservation

Office system was quite new at that point, actually, just a little over a decade old, and since the

National Register wasn’t as well known, certainly, as it is now, what was the reaction to the

public when you sent out notices about all these nominations in a particular county?

BB: Sometimes… it could run the gamut. Sometimes people would be… people usually didn’t

really know what the National Register was. And if they thought they knew, they were usually

wrong. They thought—oh, that means we can’t paint our house what we want to paint our house

or it means that we aren’t going to be able to… they’re not going to let us put a stop light on that

corner of Main Street. They just looked at it as an impediment to whatever they wanted to do.

DG: Or somebody’s going to buy the house from them.

BB: Yes, or somebody will buy the house. Or—Do you want the house? I’ve been offered many

houses![chuckles] I remember when I was doing the survey of—a couple specific ones I

remember were kind of contentious. I remember when I did the Scott County survey, the folks

down in Jordan were not happy with me for wanting to nominate a whole district in the

downtown—Jordan has a wonderful little historic downtown. And, I remember driving down to

Jordan—were you in that meeting with me? I remember Charles Skrief came—I think you came

on that one as well.

DG: I think I recall that meeting. I did go.

BB:… and, kind of going down and convincing them that this was not a bad thing, to have their

downtown nominated. It was not uncommon for us to have a meeting in the community where

we were doing nominations, because it was important to bring the public along. The regulations

back then were not quite the same as they are now. They didn’t have the same… they had owner

16

notification, obviously, but the owner consent… or the owners couldn’t object to listing the way

they can now, early in the program. So, it was especially important to make sure we had kind of

ownership, at least—not necessarily having the owners thrilled about it, but you didn’t want to

have them warring with you. So, helping them to understand the benefits of listing, what it really

meant, the kind of recognition that National Register could bring. This was also before there

were very many local ordinances. So, local communities didn’t really know very much about

what it meant, either. I remember when I was doing the survey in Rice County—Faribault was

the other city—They didn’t even… there was actually a letter in the file in Faribault that

basically said—stay out Faribault, and [chuckles] what do you do when you see that?

DG: So what did you do?

BB: So, you kind of—you drive into Faribault! [chuckles] We did set up a meeting with the city

council. But, you know, basically at the time the people in Faribault just didn’t want anyone

from the state telling them what was important in their town.

DG: So what did you tell them?

BB: We told them that they actually would be the best source, that they would know, probably,

more than we would know, and that we were there to listen to them and work with them. I mean,

historic preservation is not going to work if you clobber people with it. You’ve got to help

people see the value of these resources, and that’s really what historic preservation is all about.

It’s about stewardship and about recognizing that these are important places to the history of our

state.

DG: When you were in many of these counties, the county historical society had been around for

decades.

BB: Right.

DG: Were the county historical societies helpful in this process?

BB: They often were. They didn’t really know what they… they were helpful in that certainly

they were glad to see us. I think they didn’t have a lot of visitors at the time. They didn’t see a lot

of people coming in and really delving into the history of the county the way that… this was also

before even things like genealogy were taking off the way that they are now. So a lot of these

small historical societies didn’t see a lot of people. So I found that I was, for the most part, really

welcomed with open arms. The county societies would be very different from one county to the

next. I know, like in Scott County, the county historical society was kind of at Murphy’s

Landing. Margaret McFarland was kind of at the head at that time and… but there were smaller

chapters and certainly I can remember doing presentations for them. I think the county societies

saw the surveys… what they appreciated is that we were in their county, and we were in their

counties for an extended period of time. I think that’s one of the things that got lost when they

survey staff disbanded. There was that sense that we were there, we cared about the community,

we cared about the county, and so they really felt like they had someone on their side. And I

think that was an important partnership, and kind of one of the casualties of the layoffs, when the

17

program really had to radically change because of the funding, after ’81. It was different when

the county surveys were finished under contracts with people that were not employed by MHS—

entirely different relationship. Still, you’ve got nominations done, but it was very different than

kind of being the go-to person for that county. I remember that even within the last couple years

from time-to-time something would come up in one of the counties I’d surveyed, and I still was

familiar with that county in a way that you’re not familiar with other parts of the state, just

because you’ve driven every one of those roads, and you had seen all of those resources yourself.

So, while maybe the rigor of the nomination documentation had radically changed, you knew

that county inside out after spending several months there doing survey. And you stayed there,

too. You were sleeping in the hotel and… back before there were very many subways and

choices for [chuckles]… that’s a whole another story. Life on the road. [Laughter]

DG: Are there challenges of being in the field—and let’s talk about that a little bit—humorous

experiences, just challenges of being out there?

BB: Oh, yeah. Humorous experiences like when you pull up and you’re going to get out of the

car to take a picture and your car is surrounded by giant dogs, and you decide, OK, I’m going to

take these pictures through the window. [Chuckles] There were a couple places I was afraid to

go. I can remember there was a farm that I was fascinated by, and I remember having you go

with me because I felt vulnerable. I didn’t want to be out on the road getting out of my car,

because there were these… it was owned by a couple men that looked kind of scary when I

would drive up their driveway [chuckles], so I thought I don’t think I’ll interrupt them right now.

But they had a great barn. I wanted to get closer to that barn, but I didn’t think I should do it as a

single woman on the road at the age of twenty-five. So, there were those kinds of encounters that

were kind of surprising, sometimes. The occasional tornado when you wind up in a basement of

a farmhouse. [Chuckles] Or the nap, when you’re driving and you just realize you just can’t keep

your eyes away, so it’s—OK, I gotta pull off the road here, this is not safe. The nap in the back

of the back seat for ten minutes so you can get home safely [chuckles] after a late presentation or

something.

DG: What else do you recall about life in the office during that period? We talked a little bit

about the survey staff working together.

BB: We did work together, and I remember—well, it was a colorful survey staff. I think to be a

surveyor requires a certain amount of… you’ve got to have a strong enough personality to kind

of hold your own and be comfortable going out and doing research and being able to hold your

own in a lot of different environments. So, that makes for a salty environment of staff, let’s put it

that way. [Chuckles] We had some really lively staff meetings while we would argue about

things like survey methodology. I remember we were trying to write a survey manual and decide,

OK, where are the standards going to be? How much… are we going to take pictures of every

single rural schoolhouse or not? In fact, I remember—I was one of the later additions to the

survey staff, since I came in after someone else had left. I can remember going back after a staff

meeting that had been particularly heated, I was walking back to the office with Charles Skrief,

and Charles was trying to convince me that it wasn’t always going to be like this. [Chuckles]

because there had been a lot of harsh words and things got a little tense and—I don’t know.

[Chuckles]

18

DG: Passionate work.

BB: Passionate work, yes. But I think we had fun together, too. We shared that great space in the

Hill House. I mean, I remember the day they came in and pulled the casing off of the fireplace in

that room where we all officed. It was fun to be in the James J. Hill House during that time. I

remember the time that we were in charge of decorating for the holiday party that was at the Hill

House, making hundreds of bows and putting them everywhere on trees [chuckles] and all of

that. And I remember when we would be laboring over our nominations. I’d go and perch on

Charlie Nelson’s desk and have him help me with my architectural descriptions, because I just

didn’t have the vocabulary to do that as well as he could help me with it. So… I remember Susan

and I had a list of useful National Register phrases. It was like if you had a mental block we had

words we would use that would kind of get the juices flowing. [Chuckles]

DG: Any impressions about how the SHPO fit within the society as a whole during that period?

BB: I always felt like we were—you know, I came after the office had moved to the Hill House,

so my early tenure that was only at the Hill House. Everyone else that was in the SHPO had

started out at the fort, so they had been in the mule barns, and I remember when we would go out

to—because we were still in Don’s division, we would have meetings out at the fort occasionally

and different gatherings, and I always remember feeling like I just didn’t know the fort. I didn’t

know the people at the fort—so I always felt like we were kind of isolated. The people that I

tended to know at the society, as a survey staff person, were those that were in the Hill House.

So, the people that worked in education that were housed there with us and then the early staff

that came to work in the Hill House, people like Betsy. And then, of course, you got to know

people in the library because you spent [ ]. You’d be in the counties during kind of good

weather. In the wintertime would be when you’d be writing your nominations, and you’d be

doing your library research and things like that. But, I think we were kind of autonomous, but

somewhat set apart. The statewide archaeology survey was in the Hill House with us, and that

was part of the SHPO, and they were a pretty boisterous group as well, and they would be in the

field for long periods of time. Basically, the rhythm would be that you would be on the road a

week and you’d be in the office a week during those field months. So, that wore you down after

awhile. Most of my counties weren’t too far away, so it wasn’t as—I think for some people it

would have been a lot more than my experience was that way. You know—Scott County, you

don’t spend the night in Scott County. [Chuckles]

DG: Anything else about that experience of …

BB: The survey, the …

DG: The society through those three years?

BB: I think we were really quite an independent little group, and I sometimes got the impression

that they didn’t quite know what to do with us. Actually, I got that impression even more

recently, too,[chuckles] sometimes. I think the nature of our work was somehow a little different

than what a lot of the other staff at the Historical Society do. Part of it is the federal framework

19

that we work within and part of it is the regulatory spin that much of the work has, and there’s

kind of a mystery to it. Even now it’s sometimes hard for people to understand exactly what it is.

DG: Were there any other issues or aspects of the overall office’s work during that period that

were …

BB: You know, I think that one of the things that I think is probably… merits mentioning a little

bit is one of the important things that happened that first year I was there, was the Red Wing row

house case. And because I was surveying the city of Red Wing… I didn’t get personally that

involved—obviously, Charles Skrief was carrying a lot of that load, but I remember gathering a

lot of the information, and certainly being in the town where it was really lively.

DG: And how did that go?

BB: That was very interesting, and it was interesting because a lot of people in the local

community didn’t understand the value of the row houses. But they were right smack dab in the

middle of the mall historic district. [Chuckles] Major anchor, and Erickson’s was not a very nice

alternative to that corner of the mall. The other thing that happened in that district is kitty-corner

from the row houses was the YWCA, and the YWCA came down shortly after the row houses,

and that was a really bitter battle in Red Wing—I think even more so than the row houses. The

row houses were the big battle because of the [mirror] lawsuit. The Y was the big battle because

you’d have a small community. You’ve got spouses on opposite sides of the issue. Who’s going

to stand up for it? So it was a real interesting dynamic at play. And then I remember when the

depot came up, the one that became the Hardee’s Restaurant. That was another one. So, it

seemed like major battle in Red Wing, one after another. And they really do tear a community

apart. It makes it really difficult for a community to kind of understand how historic preservation

can possibly be a positive thing, when it seems like they’re always doing battle over it. At least

with the… the depot was also a battle. It didn’t land in court, but I remember working on that

nomination as an individual nomination, after the MRN had been done. Actually, we didn’t do an

MRN for that one—we did individual nominations. But then, that one, when that building got

preserved and then other positive things started happening, I think some of that initial friction

that occurred as a result of the row houses and the loss of the Y dissipated to a certain extent.

And then I remember when I was doing the Scott County survey, there were huge issues about

the river crossing, because one of the farm houses that was nominated—right now the name of it

is escaping me—was right in the location where the pier for the new bridge was supposed to be,

and I remember Clem Kachelmeier and all these other folks came to that State Review Board

meeting, because they were concerned about that. So that was my first intersection with 106, as a

surveyor working on the survey.

DG: And many people’s first experience with some of these laws and conventions and, as you

said earlier, even the National Register. So, it was a bit on the frontier of consciousness.

BB: Um hum. People really didn’t know what to think about it. I’m trying to think if there were

really any other really… there was definitely an interest… a very fascinating chapter. I

remember writing my Christmas letter one time, back then, to my friends, telling my friends

from Carleton that—I can’t believe that this is actually my job! [chuckles] Because there was a

20

kind of a richness to it, to be doing something that… it felt very… it was so new. We were

forming this program. We were kind of figuring it out as we went. Not a guesswork kind of

figuring it out, but trying to… how do you deal with this huge state? How do you deal with the

things you encounter during the course of a survey—that kind of figuring it out. And, you know,

it was a lot of fun. Met some fascinating people along the way, and I’ll never forget the sensation

in Rice County, driving over the rise and coming to the Valley Grove churches, thinking—how

could this have been hiding from me? I lived at Carleton for four years, just a few miles from

here—how could I have missed this amazing landscape? There was always that sense… I’m sure

all of us, as surveyors, had those experiences where all of a sudden you’d come across things,

and you’d think—how could I have… people have gotta know about this.

DG: And that particular property has come so far in terms of lots of protections.

BB: Yes. Yes.

DG: Private protections, public protections, since that early period.

BB: I know. And that was one of the nominations I did for that particular multiple resource area

nomination.

DG: So, in the context of your enthusiasm for your work, how did it feel when the lay-offs of

1981 started to materialize?

BB: That was really depressing. I think when we got word—boy—February, was that when we

staring out the window thinking—what’s going to happen to us? First winds that we were in

trouble, so there was a long time that we really didn’t know what was going to happen. And it

was really kind of despairing. Part of it was obviously you were worried about your own jobs,

but you were also—I was young and I knew I could find another—I’d find something. But there

was also—we were people with a mission. We wanted to finish this work. We had great plans,

[chuckles] and it was almost missionary work in some ways, when you’d be out there trying to

do the cause of historic preservation and thought—who’s going to carry this on? So, there was

that piece of the disappointment. And there was a real frustration with the institution, because we

felt like we weren’t getting answers and I’m sure that they really couldn’t give us answers.

Having been on the management side of things, in hindsight I know what they were wrestling

with, but at the time it was very frustrating. But, it was months and months of… and I think the

fact that there were as many of us as there were was helpful, because we were support to one

another during that difficult time. But that’s when it’s difficult to be an island, and we were sort

of an island in the department.

DG: In your experience and dialog with other state programs, since that period, do you think that

was a relatively unique survey experience?

BB: You mean Minnesota’s as opposed to other states?

DG: Yeah, in that period, to have a staff, a core staff group of surveyors that were working

through the state in a coordinated fashion.

21

BB: You know, I think it was. I think it was more unusual than I thought at the time. Actually

the thing that has been the most unusual to discover—we were one of the few states that actually

finished the survey. It took us until ’88 to finish the countywide survey, those later years through

using consultants, but even as recent as a couple years ago when I would talk about the county

survey at a [ ] meeting, or something, people would be astounded that we actually finished the

countywide survey. I mean, that continues to be a topic that comes before congress, in our

funding requests—the need to do more survey. The fact that there’s so much survey that still

needs to be done. Clearly, now we have a lot of survey to do in Minnesota—a different kind of

survey, but that baseline survey that was done during the years of 1977-1988 I think is

invaluable. It’s an amazing resource. Yes, there’s not a lot of information on many of those

survey forms, but I wouldn’t dismiss the value of it. A trained eye picked out those buildings and

snapped a picture and made a few notations and didn’t take the picture of the one next door or …

DG: And as you said earlier, in many cases it knit together the narrative of the background of

that particular region.

BB: It did. Absolutely. Right. It told the story, and we continue to use that information. I think

people that are doing survey today, the consultants that come in and use the SHPO office’s files

get frustrated with the lack of information on a lot of those forms, and I certainly understand that.

We get frustrated with that, too. But, you have to understand what it was and what it represents,

and if a property was inventoried, there was a reason it was inventoried. It wasn’t just a

haphazard somebody filled out a form for it. I always thought the way to do the survey, though,

really would have been on a bicycle. It would have been a better speed. [Chuckles]

DG: [chuckles] Do you think we would have still been working on the initial survey?

BB: I think we would still be like halfway through the counties if we’d done that! [Laughter]

DG: Not a bad idea, especially with all the evolution of the bike trails since then. It might be

quite pleasant.

BB: I know! It might have been kind of fun. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else that was

really significant in that. You know the other little project—we did some fun little projects in

that crazy time. We did the farmscape guide, which I always thought was a great little tool. The

thing that I liked about it is that it kind of knit together all of our survey experience, so that it was

statewide, it wasn’t countywide. Looking at… because we learned a lot about agricultural

resources. That was kind of a fun project to work on. I remember working on the layout with

Earl Guttnecht when it got close to being done. The other thing that I remember working on is

the historic contexts. That was something that came… when did the Park Service introduce that?

You came back after that meeting. It must have been near the end of the second year, maybe, that

I was there, probably about the end of ’80. The interesting thing was—that was really the

framework that was in our mind all the time. It was just putting some meat to the bones. because

that’s really what our multiple resource area nominations were. They were contexts. But thinking

beyond county boundaries and thinking statewide and contexts, was a really valuable exercise.

And again, the contexts that we fleshed out, albeit in a pretty surface… not at a deep level, have

22

served us well. We continue to use them. We add to them through thematic contexts, city

contexts, the CLGs do, but the basic statewide contexts have really held up.

DG: You’re pointing out a lot of work that was done in three years.

BB: I know! As I think about it, it was a lot of work. The thing that I really… now as I reflect

back on it, there was—I think this was why I would write in my Christmas letters that I was

having so much fun—I was really doing history, and it was fun and rich and delving into the

resources and dusting off records books in the courthouses and meeting with people and crawling

around in buildings and getting stuck in the mud, [chuckles] but it was quite an adventure.

DG: A material culture student’s dream.

BB: That’s right.

DG: Those cuts came about at Christmastime, I think, in 1981?

BB: Um hum. Yeah.

DG: So 1982 dawned a little bit differently.

BB: It sure did.

DG: And what were you up to then?

BB: Well, I made a major shift. I went to work for my dad and worked in the dinner theatre for

what became eight years. When I left the society and knew I would be going to work for my

dad—he’d been… he really wanted me to work for him. And I thought, OK, I’ll give him five

years, but I didn’t really think I’d stay as long as I did. And I didn’t really know what I would be

doing at the theatre, but when you’re working for your father you just do lots of things. So I was

working initially in the area of marketing and public relations, and did that for a couple years.

And then I shifted over to running the whole theatre division, so I was working… negotiating all

the actors’ contracts and the licenses for shows in the four theatres and handling the budgets,

basically honing a lot of administrative and managerial skills. So, for me it was a great way to

shape another whole skill set. The interesting thing is when I was working on the marketing and

in the public relations, I never before would have thought that there was much of a connection

between my survey work and going to the theatre to work, but my knowledge of the state was a

real asset, because , the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre is the kind of place that really attracts a

statewide audience. So, we would have people drive in from Wadena or who knows where, and

I’d greet them and I’d know where they were from, [chuckles] and they were always impressed.

So, I was just a little surprised to discover, but it was a good experience. I think my parents were

getting older at that point. My parents were trying to decide what to do with the theatre, were

they going to pass it on to the next generation. I think to a certain extent there was an expectation

that I might take on the management of the whole business, but instead we as a family decided

we would sell the theatre, and you and I stayed in contact over those years. Not real often, but a

couple of times a year we’d get together for dinner or something and talk, so I always kept my

23

ear to the ground on what was happening in SHPO because I kind of missed that world. I

remember probing the notion—is there any—what’s happening? I’m thinking of making some

changes. So, that was kind of when doors started opening and another temporary position opened

up.

DG: In the meantime SHPO was gradually coming back to its feet after being reduced to a staff

of three-and-a-half people for some time, and we did a number of things, I think, during the time

that you were away. One of the things was to combine the SHPO with the field services and

grants area.

BB: Right.

DG: So, there had been a number of things that had happened in that rebuilding process, but

when you came back, how did it feel?

BB: You know, what was really funny is it felt—it was still mostly the same people. That was

the thing that really shocked me. So, it felt familiar, but yet it felt different. By this time we were

at the history center out at Fort Snelling, and I had initially come back—it was a temporary

position, and I was going to be helping you with—I think there were three things on our list. We

had to get ready for the audit. The National Park Service was getting ready to do a program

audit, and we hadn’t done well on the previous one. There had been some issues, so we were

trying to get ahead of the game, and I was organized, [chuckles] and you didn’t have time. CLGs

were a part of the program—Certified Local Governments—that was growing and needed a little

more time and attention, and the other area was planning, that needed more time and attention

than you were able to give it as deputy at the time. So those were the three areas I kind of landed

in. I know the first six months that I worked there I actually—I was working thirty-five hours a

week because I was still working at Chanhassen. I hadn’t quite left, [chuckles] so I’d leave an

hour or so early every afternoon so I could beat the traffic and get out to Chanhassen to work in

the evening. So that was a little double-duty craziness. I don’t know what I was thinking, but

[chuckles]…

DG: It was a temporary position.

BB: It was a temporary position, so I didn’t… and we were getting ready, we had sold the theatre

in June, so… but I also was helping you to get some other positions created. It was during that

time we worked on filling the archaeologist’s position, and we eventually got the survey

coordinator [ ] position at the time—kept extending that, we were doing contract after contract

with MNDOT, kind of limping along, trying to figure out how do we get this whole database

thing going, how do we deal with the bridges, how do we tackle some of these things, but our

federal appropriation was growing, and we would work with Win Grandstrand. I ended up doing

a lot of the administrative, the HPF administration stuff for you. It seemed at that time that more

of your time as deputy was going into the compliance area. There were some all-consuming

things going on, as can happen. And I kind of naturally—maybe it was after my Chanhassen

experience, all of that—it was not difficult for me to figure out how to make all of these federal

grants work. I can remember the meetings with Doug Main and John Wood, when we would get

in trouble for the SHPO shortfall. Do you remember the SHPO shortfall? [laughter]

24

DG: Absolutely. Talk about it some more.

BB: The SHPO shortfall was the problem that we had because of the way the budget was

structured. It really wasn’t a SHPO shortfall, that’s just what the finance office called it.

[Chuckles] What it was was an unmatched SHPO program. And so, the shortfall was the

shortage of match that was needed in order to leverage the full amount of federal funds. And part

of the problem was the way that the finance office was tracking the funds. So that, rather than

kind of front-loading it and figuring out how to make it work for the whole year, they’d spend all

of the money and then you’d get near the end of the year and you’d have this huge shortfall and

then would scramble like maniacs. So, it meant kind of looking in the budget in a whole different

way. It meant planning the SHPO budget in a different way. And Win Grandstrand actually

knew how to do that, but I don’t think he ever was given that latitude to kind of restructure it.

They seemed to like the SHIPO shortfall method. Maybe they liked yelling at us, I don’t know!

[chuckles] But I remember the meeting with John Lilja after he was hired, and for the first time

someone realized that it wasn’t a SHIPO shortfall. He saw the problem immediately. It was just

the way they had been looking at it. And there was a shortage of match. This was a huge

problem. One of the things that, when I came back, I saw, was that our office was receiving in

federal funds pretty decent share. I think we were in the—what—seventeenth or so in the state as

far as the ranking in the SHPO appropriation. But, in terms of what the state was putting into the

program, we were near the bottom. We were like within the bottom four or five states. It was an

embarrassment. It’s not that MHS wasn’t putting money into historic preservation. Obviously,

there’s historic preservation that’s going on at historic sites and some other functions, but it

wasn’t coming to the program that needed the match to fully fund the preservation program. And

we were plagued with that for, actually, most of my tenure. It’s sad, but it’s true. Things started

improving after… as grant programs grew, and we were able to find ways to use some of the

grants programs to match, to meet that matching shortfall. I used to call myself the match

magician, because I managed to figure out how to leverage match from other people. I convinced

people like the city of Minnetonka that the survey they were going to do, even though they

weren’t getting any money from us, that they should do a cooperative agreement with us so we

could use it match our federal program. I don’t know why they would have agreed to that, but

they did. And because of that, we were able to attract $30,000 of match. [Chuckles]

DG: It must have sounded like the right thing to do.

BB: I think I said—We’ll provide more support for you, or whatever, so that we were there to

answer your questions and make sure it was fully integrated. But they weren’t a surveyable

government, but they wanted to do a survey, so we would do things like… also structuring some

of our contracts so that we would leverage match, whether it was with the Preservation Alliance

of Minnesota, through the [Reuse Study] contracts, where we would put some federal funds in,

but they would also be coming up with soft match. But it really was a huge challenge to figure

out how to keep the engine running. And then when the audit did come around—I’m trying to

remember—something had happened, I can’t remember what it was. They didn’t like the way

that we were doing our… we didn’t get a bad mark, but they did come back with some

recommendations that we have more financial accountability within our own area. The park

service was uncomfortable with the way that it was structured, but it was so separate between our

25

office and the finance office. The communication was not very strong, and then Win left, and so

that’s when things kind of really changed. I can’t remember the name of the woman we worked

with—Shelley, was her name Shelley? I think it was. Anyway, I’m losing my train of thought…

[Chuckles]

DG: This would probably be a good place for us to break, and then we can pick this up in

another section.

BB: Yeah, it might be, because we’re kind of in a new chapter—yeah.

DG: Kind of moving into a very new chapter, actually.

BB: Right, exactly.

DG: That would begin in the early ‘90s; so, maybe we can sign off …

BB: Sounds good.

DG: And we’ll be back a bit later.

BB: [Chuckles] Sounds good.

Beginning of interview on May 21st, 2012

DG: OK, we’re back, and it is May 21st, 2012. We’re resuming the interview. My name is

Dennis Gimmestad, and we are interviewing Britta Bloomberg about her work at the Minnesota

Historical Society, Last week we talked a little bit about Britta’s growing up years, her years in

college, her early work years, her first assignment at the historical society, working on the

statewide survey, and then her work with the family business following the lay-off of a good

share of the SHPO staff in 1981. We ended up talking a little bit about her return to the Historical

Society, and some of the ways that the State Historic Preservation Office and the society had

changed over the intervening years when she was away. So, this week we are going to start a

new chapter in the history of the State Historic Preservation Office and a new chapter in Britta’s

career. In 1991, Britta was appointed the Department Head of Historic Preservation Field

Services and Grants, and the Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer. So, Britta, what sort of

challenges and opportunities motivated you to seek that position?

BB: [Chuckles] I don’t know that I really sought the position, but when you left that position,

and it was vacated, I remember walking into Donn Coddington’s office and saying—Now what

are we going to do? and saying that I was willing to do whatever he needed to keep things going

for a period of time. So, I was obviously first appointed “acting” in that position. And I think it

was really while I was acting in the position that I became convinced that I wanted to apply for

the job. I think initially it was really more—OK, how do we keep our heads above water while

we keep heading in a direction that makes some sense, and what can I do to facilitate some

stability and continuity in a transition time, so that was kind of my initial motivation. But, as I

jumped into that position, I realized that it was something that I think I really wanted to pursue,

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so I then did, indeed, did apply for the job, once they formally posted it. I think it took awhile. I

think I was in an acting capacity for about nine months. It was a long acting appointment before

they moved forward with the hiring process.

DG: Was there anything in particular about your experience during that period that was

particularly motivating?

BB: You know, I think I enjoyed the challenge of the variety in the position. I think, in my

previous position, when I had been Historic Preservation Specialist, kind of focusing on just the

three areas of planning, certified local governments, and just general grants administration—

when I say grants administration, I am really meaning the Historic Preservation Fund grants

administration, not the grants program. At that time it was Tim Glines that was managing that

program. So, it was really being able to roll my sleeves up and get involved in a more substantive

way again with things like National Register, to see the way that the rest of the department kind

of gelled together so that it was not just the Historic Preservation Office, but it was also the

grants office, and it was also the Local History Services Section that at that time was headed by

Dave Nystuen. So it was—I think it was just a challenge that I felt was worth stepping up to and

seeing where I could take it. I think the other thing that was attractive to me is in my previous

position I had, working with the Historic Preservation Fund program in particular, there were

many opportunities to work with the National Park Service staff, and I found the National Park

Service relationship in the SHPO office one that was particularly engaging. I enjoyed the staff in

the National Park Service that worked with our program, and in preparing us for the program

review audit that we had in—I can’t remember what year that was—was it 1990? I think the year

before I became the deputy. There were many opportunities to understand better how the whole

national program really operated. So, part of the attraction of the position to me was realizing

that the Minnesota program really nested within a much larger national program, and I found that

particularly interesting, as well. How could we make this all work together.

DG: Something that I’ve heard folks comment about in terms of the entire historic preservation

program in the United States is that the genius of the program, perhaps, is the fact that we have a

federal system that sets the policy and sets the program, then we have a lot of empowerment

activities that happen at the local level, but the state offices are in the middle.

BB: Um hum. That’s very true.

DG: They really need to knit the system together, and it sounds like—that you made some

specific observations about the federal program—do you have anything else to say about the tone

that the National Park Service set for the preservation program as a whole?

BB: When I reflect back on the many years of my career in this work, in some ways I think the

program, the federal program, kind of can be lumped into decades of major thrusts of the

program. When I first joined the office in the ‘70s, the program was just taking shape, and it was

all about kind of empowering the states. It was a federal program but now the states have this

mandate. Everything at the federal level was all about how to empower the states, how to

basically get them up to speed, how to get them operating the National Register program, how to

get them kind of thinking in terms of historic context so that there was a larger framework within

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which all of this operated, and really, then, in the 1980s, ‘90s, with the beginning of the Certified

Local Government Program, which was authorized first in ’85, but really was kind of full steam

ahead by the early 90s, it was about empowering the local governments. And certainly the local

governments were important players earlier in the program, but the federal program didn’t put

that emphasis on them until that point in time. After I became deputy in the 90s, kind of the next

chapter of that was about empowering the tribes. The federal legislation had had a section that

was kind of set aside, kind of put on reserve to be developed later, and that was Section 101d2,

where it talks about basically the role of the tribes in the federal Historic Preservation Program.

So, it really is a partnership with all of those components, and I think it took that many decades

before each partner was fully mobilized to be playing a meaningful role. I was privileged to

serve as deputy during that whole period of time when the tribes really came into their own.

Early-on, the tribes were not very frequently at the table with us, whether it was in compliance

issues or any matter. But, really, after the amendments to the legislation in 1992 that empowered

the tribes and really placed a great deal of responsibility on their shoulders and set up a system

where tribes could actually assume responsibilities under the Historic Preservation Act, their

parallel to the states. For all tribes, whether they assume those responsibilities or not, to have a

voice in compliance program really changed how we did our work, and it’s been very satisfying

over these last probably fifteen-twenty years to watch the tribes really come into their own and

have very meaningful roles in the process. And, certainly, some of the relationships that I’ve

enjoyed these past years have been with some wonderful colleagues in the tribal programs all

around the state. I think one of the things in Minnesota that was especially satisfying in that is

that because of the framework in Minnesota, because the Minnesota SHPO is not appointed by

the governor, as that position is in most states, I always felt like in Minnesota we enjoyed a little

more stability and a little less political pressure on the institution and on the office, in terms of

really being able to step out and do some of the things that need to be done in preservation. And

so, my participation, whether it was with the National Conference of SHPOs as the chairman of

the tribal programs task force, or working with the National Park Service in helping to develop

those guidelines in those early years of the program, my participation was really encouraged. My

colleagues in other states wouldn’t have had that luxury to really be encouraged by their

administrations to move forward, but in Minnesota we enjoyed a little different dynamic. And

MHS had already established its Indian Advisory Committee, so there was already a pretty solid

understanding in place about interaction of tribes in thinking about Minnesota history, how we

tell the story, and in particular how we engage with the tribes in that process.

DG: Any particular key points in sort of the evolution of that program in Minnesota as the

federal provisions were put into place and then as that was pursued?

BB: You know, there were a couple of things that were kind of interesting, actually. Bruce Vento

was instrumental in the ’92 amendments, and Heather Hike on his staff worked with him on that,

and I was able to work with Heather and Vento’s office in going back and forth on some of the

language changes as time marched forward, and I was also, at the time I was on the board of the

National Conference of SHPOs, and chairing the task force on tribal programs, and worked

closely with the National Park Service as they began to promulgate the guidelines for the tribal

programs. The National Park Service conducted meetings all around the country. The tribes were

not very happy at first with the National Park Service. Maybe this is just a little repeat of history,

where the tribes and the federal government aren’t always on the best of terms, but the tribes

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really gave the National Park Service a lot of grief for not doing better consultation early-on, and

it was Pat Tiller and Brian Mitchell, former SHPO from the state of Virginia who then went on

staff with National Park Service in the tribal programs, who became kind of the voice of the

National Park Service in working on those guidelines—and also Pat Parker. So, it was

participating in the Keepers of the Treasures meetings—they were not really designed at all for

the preservation program. It was really more to get the tribes engaged, but then it got down to the

nitty gritty of what do the program guidelines look like and how are the tribes going to assume

these responsibilities. There was one consultation meeting that actually happened in Scottsdale

Arizona in the summer of—I think it was ’91—no, it was ’92—’93, probably ’93. Have to look

back and look that date up. Anyway, it was interesting because all of a sudden I had a phone call

from Pat Tiller. He wanted to know if I would go to this consultation meeting with him,

representing the national conference of SHPOs. I told him I would, but I said I was really

uncomfortable going to a tribal consultation meeting. I said the tribes in Arizona are going to

think who’s this little white person you brought from Minnesota. So, I said I’ll go on the

condition that I can bring one of my tribal colleagues, and Elise Aune flew down to Scottsdale

with me. We actually had a really meaningful consultation in Scottsdale, and I’ve never regretted

that decision that I needed to bring someone from one of the tribes if we were going to have

meaningful discussion. That really was the first of what became many consultation meetings.

Here in Minnesota, two tribes were among the first twelve to be certified by the National Park

Service and assume responsibilities under the new provisions in the Historic Preservation Act,

and that was both Mille Lacs and Leech Lake. So, I think that it was particularly meaningful that

here a relatively small state—certainly we have a tribal presence, but it’s not as large as it is in

some parts of the west—that two of the first twelve tribes to assume Tribal Historic Preservation

Office responsibilities under the act were here in Minnesota. When I left the office we were, I

think, up to eight tribes that have now taken that step, so certainly that’s something that’s really

significant and one of the program areas that I’m really pleased about that flourished under the

time I headed the office.

DG: As those local programs within the various tribes of Minnesota came on line—those various

tribal programs, I should say—came on line, what were some of the areas where the most

meaningful discussion or exploration took place? In terms of preservation, what types of issues

came forward, what types of conflicts, if you will, or other opportunities to work together came

along?

BB: One of the things that was, I think, really interesting, when I kind of harken back to when I

was chairing the task force with [Etha Nichbow] and there was a lot of angst on the part of

colleagues in other states about what this would mean when tribes would take on some of the

responsibilities. But it basically meant the SHPO office would no longer have that responsibility

for the area which basically was the exterior boundaries of the reservation that was assuming the

responsibility. So, there was a lot of angst about whether the tribes would appropriately care for

the, say, reservation era boarding schools, or there was, I think, a great deal of concern about the

churches, the boarding schools, those property types that perhaps wouldn’t have the best

memories on the part of tribes. So, a real sensitive area. Here in Minnesota, the first tribes to

assume the responsibilities really decided only to take on the responsibility for archeological

sites and traditional cultural properties. They—both Mille Lacs and Leech Lake, and now some

other tribes have kind of followed that model, but they recognize that they didn’t need to have an

29

architectural historian on their tribal program staff, that we could have a very satisfactory

partnership with both the preservation office and the tribe basically to carry out the review of

those kinds of properties, and they’ve forged ahead with an emphasis on traditional cultural

properties and archeological sites. That seemed to really work well in Minnesota. But, there

certainly were some sensitive area kind of properties. In Minnesota I don’t remember there being

the kind of big heartburn about properties that there were in some other states. I don’t think there

was a doubting in our minds that the tribes would step up and do this. There was maybe some

concern in some states as to whether the tribes would be capable of tackling the National

Register program or, you know, whatever. What’s interesting, though, about the guidelines for

the tribes—and this was something that the tribes really argued hard for—it’s something that

states aren’t able to argue for, but the tribes under the guidelines can elect which programs they

want to assume responsibility for, and the ones they don’t want stay with the SHPO office. I

don’t think any tribe here in Minnesota has assumed 100 percent of the responsibilities. I don’t

think any tribe has taken on the National Register. Some have aspired to take that on in time, but

they realize that the program needs to mature and they want to build their staff and program

before they take on some of that. Not a single tribe has taken on certified local governments.

How many reservations have municipalities within them that would want to be a certified local

government, and have that fall within the purview of the tribe? So, the fact that they have kind of

a multiple choice approach to which program areas they want to take on is somewhat unique. I

think that the tribes bring a different perspective. In many ways the tribes are a lot closer to the

resource than we ever will be. I think they bring a passion for the resources that is much… it’s

grounded differently than our passion is. I think our passion as staff in the SHPO office is more

about an intellectual and historical passion. With the tribes it really is who they are, how do they

understand the identity in the… so one area that tribes are also engaging in—not only do they get

to pick and choose, but they can also branch out and tackle things like language preservation, and

areas that wouldn’t necessary fall within the preservation program in a SHPO office.

DG: In another program area some would say that the concept of traditional cultural properties

being eligible to the National Register was also an exploration of the same issue …

BB: Yeah, it really …

DG: Happening in another area, and it’s just interesting to hear you reflect on how the whole

concept of traditional cultural properties perhaps was an area where the tribes had more to teach

the rest of the preservation community. I’ve heard that said.

BB: Um hum. I think definitely that would be the case. Early-on we did a couple projects with

Gerald White at Leech Lake—he was at the tribal historic preservation office at Leech Lake

early-on, working with Rose Kluth, and we did a kind of cooperative project, to try to spend a

little more time intentionally thinking about traditional cultural properties. I don’t think the

project itself—we directed Historic Preservation Fund dollars towards it—I don’t think the

project itself was all that satisfying in what it produced, but it really forged an important

partnership with the tribe, and I think the value there can’t be understated.

DG: So we have a national program that’s increasingly operating at lots of different levels that

you had to become familiar with fairly quickly in that position. The other thing that you had to

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face was a much more local undertaking at that point, and that was the move to the new History

Center.

BB: That was quite—yes! [Chuckles] And when I think about the move to the History Center the

thing that comes to my mind, and this has nothing to do, really, with moving to the History

Center, but I remember the week that we moved to the History Center was the week that the

Veblen farmstead changed hands and that Bill Melton purchased it from the Veblen Preservation

Project, and because we had to box everything up and we had to entrust it to the movers, I was

afraid that this valuable box of information about the Veblen farmstead would somehow get lost

in the shuffle or temporarily misplaced, so I remember my car became the file for the Veblen

farmstead while we shuttled things back and forth, and I drove the preservation agreement over

to Bill Melton’s home so that he and Jane could sign on the dotted line, and then we went down

to Northfield for the closing and that was quite a… so when I think of the move to the History

Center, I was really distracted by the fact that we were finally solving a long term preservation

challenge with the Veblen farmstead. The two maybe don’t go hand-in-hand in the same way,

just coincidentally happened on the same day.

DG: Perhaps it’s a good illustration about how preservation waits for no one, even when you’re

making a major move.

BB: That’s true. Yes. I know, I remember trying to conduct phone calls and having no desk at

the Fort Snelling office and having no desk at the History Center and kind of plopping myself

down in the middle of my empty office with no furniture in it, and a few random boxes and a

phone just kind of attached to the wall, trying to – of course this is before we were using cell

phones and the like to make these arrangements and to make sure that we were at the appropriate

location when needed.

DG: I want to get back to talking about things like the Veblen farm and some of the other issues

in a minute, but talk just a little bit more about that move and what that meant for the office.

BB: You know, it’s interesting—when it was announced that we were moving—obviously the

History Center was under construction and well into the planning before I returned to the society.

I don’t know that they had actually broken ground before I returned, but the planning was well

under way. So, it was understood that, yes, we would be moving to the History Center and I

think that staff in the SHPO office, for the most part, were kind of maybe somewhat ambivalent,

some of them. Others, recalcitrant, [chuckles] have no desire to head over to Saint Paul where,

heaven forbid, you might have to pay for parking and not have the convenience of being right on

the river at Fort Snelling. But when I think about the fact that we moved to the History Center

that year, I think it was a really important move for us, and certainly as a department it helped

integrate us with the rest of the society in a way that I don’t think would have happened, had we

not moved to the History Center. It was a change that took some getting used to. I still wish we’d

moved into a historic building. I received a lot of flak when we moved to the new History

Center, and some of our colleagues in other parts of the state didn’t really understand—times

were not always booming in all corners of the state, so I can remember conducting some public

meetings, really to try to scare up feedback on the preservation program and priorities for the

coming year’s survey and things of that nature, but all people wanted to talk about was the new

31

History Center and—How can you spend so much money on a brand new History Center when

out here in Thief River Falls, or wherever we are, we are struggling so to make ends meet. So

those of us in the field faced that side of it, so you’d handle those kinds of questions with some

diplomacy and sensitivity… but certainly, moving to the History Center, for the entire institution

to be under one roof was a very positive thing, when it came to being more fully integrated

within the institution. Having spent the previous years trying to manage the program from afar—

that number of miles between the fort and the business office, for instance, or when we would

chase over to 690 to attend a meeting at Nina’s office, or… it’s a lot more convenient to have the

business office in the same building.

DG: One of the things that time at the fort encouraged was dialog between the State Historic

Preservation Office and historic sites staff, since we were housed together in a relatively isolated

location.

BB: Yes.

DG: Can you talk a little bit about that relationship?

BB: Sure, and actually I think that is probably what we lost in moving to the History Center.

There wasn’t as much integration. I don’t know that it was just the proximity of the two

departments. The other factor that contributed to that is when I was first hired and when I first

became department head, the Historic Preservation Office, the whole department, was part of the

division that Donn Coddington headed, that included historic sites, archeology, and historic

preservation field services and grants. Having us report to Donn in one division also fostered that

closer communication and coordination with sites and archeology, and that, I think, really

changed when Donn retired and in the kind of restructuring after that, when they didn’t fill his

position and put together a… or keep the division together, and I began to, then, report directly to

Ian Stuart, that communication kind of broke down. At the time, historic sites was reporting

directly to Ian as well. I think archeology was, too. But, we weren’t kind of a unit any more, a

division that really… when Donn headed the division, as department heads we would meet

monthly and do some programming together from time to time, certainly more collaboration.

When Donn saw needs in different areas and knew that they perhaps could be met by someone in

another area, there was just a little more flexibility for addressing them. I remember working on

the plan, for instance, getting ready for the audit, even. There was one time when he had John

Hacket work on something to try to help us get ready for some of that. That kind of collaboration

wasn’t as easily followed through after those changes were made.

DG: The Historic Sites Department, of course, operated more conventional museum sites …

BB: Right. Exactly.

DG: …whereas the State Historic Preservation Office was looking at a much broader range of

historic preservation activity. How did that difference in focus affect the collaboration?

BB: You know, I think it makes for an interesting dynamic, because I think the Historic Sites

Division, now—it’s a division; it’s no longer a department—many people within the sites

32

division saw the historic sites as kind of the backdrop for the interpretation. It became the setting

for the programs that they carried out; whereas, in the Historic Preservation Office, we saw the

place, itself, as the story. And, yes, you want to put meat on it in terms of the interpretation, but I

think that sometimes the preservation office staff would think that the historic sites staff didn’t

have sufficient respect for the historic resources themselves. And that sometimes could create

some tension. I think maybe where it became… the kind of more recent example where that was

most apparent was probably with—one of the more recent ones would have been at Mill City

Museum, when there were some problems with the wall and the Historic Sites Division wanted

to remedy problems a certain way, and we wanted to put the brakes on and say let’s understand

this engine room a little better. Let’s not just jump ahead and deal with the crack in the wall

and… So it was just a tension that seems to be always somewhat present. Same is true at Fort

Snelling.

DG: Perhaps both departments contributing something to the other.

BB: Yeah, certainly. And I think over the years that relationship has been stronger and weaker,

often depending on the players in different positions. There was a period of time when Rachel

Tooker housed, when she was working on the Mille Lacs museum, when her office actually was

down with us in the History Center on Level A, and that kind of helped to foster a stronger

working together relationship for a period of time. And I think more recently Natasha’s coming

to the preservation office staff from the historic sites has helped to facilitate better understanding

between divisions and the department, but certainly I’ve always really seen the important role

that the historic sites play in putting some meat on the bones to the stories that these places can

tell, so… but it’s been somewhat of a puzzle as to how to bring that together. Part of it is it’s

such a large division and kind of unwieldy. But many times we would hold workshops or

programs at sites’ locations, so there have been many opportunities to work together. I know just

this last year, working in the preservation plan, I was talking with Diane Adams-Graff about

some ideas for using some of the legacy funds from the partnerships for perhaps some

programming at sites that would encourage preservation treatment. We talked about doing some

workshops, for instance, on windows at Fort Snelling. There’s an endless supply of windows at

Fort Snelling, where you could actually do some hands-on workshops and come up with some

kind of a curriculum that some useful skills could be taught.

DG: One interesting thing about sort of the interrelationship between those two programs is that

a lot of the first properties that were put on the National Register of Historic Places were the

society’s historic sites. And, I think as the National Register program evolved over the years and

matured over the years, the ways that sites were documented certainly became more precise and

the way one understood a historic property became much more rigorous than it was at the

beginning.

BB: Yes, yes.

DG: Maybe you could talk a little bit about that, about how the National Register changed over

the years, some of the issues in the changes, perhaps, that happened, and just how you would

characterize that program today.

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BB: I think we touched on this a little bit last week when we talked about the National Register

nominations that we were doing back in the early ‘80s, and certainly back then the content that

was required for a National Register nomination was very different than it was today. There is

significant rigor involved now in completing a National Register nomination. It’s been

interesting to watch this evolve, actually, because I’ve also watched it evolve from the

perspective of having been on the board of the National Conference of SHPOs and heard a lot of

the dialog with the National Park Service and the National Register staff in particular, who are

very concerned about keeping the National Register program accessible to the public. So, the

tension that is present is how do you keep a program like the National Register that demands a

certain amount of rigor and historical scholarship and all of the rest—how do you keep that

program accessible so that Ma and Pa who own the historic property in the neighborhood in

some small town somewhere aren’t turned off by how challenging it can be to get that property

listed. It is a challenge. What we ended up doing in our office, and I think you were probably the

one that initiated this process, because it was in place when I came back, and that is that we kind

of kept a running list of properties that we thought really ought to be listed on the National

Register, that we’d done a certain amount of preliminary analysis, and were convinced that they

were likely eligible, and we put them on a list and thought—when we get to them, we’ll get to

them, but we’ll hire a contract historian or architectural historian to do the legwork and put the

documentation together and we’ll get these listed when we can. That’s something that still serves

us today. We continue to do that from time to time. Now, with legacy grants, there are other

ways to help the property owners that are really interested in pursuing National Register, and

communities do that. But, I’ve always thought the National Register needs to have a certain

amount of rigor. The National Register is the National Register. It shouldn’t be taken too lightly.

It’s not the National Register of everything that you can get listed. [Chuckles] Or the National

Register of all those properties that are seeking tax credits. It’s the National Register of Historic

Places, and so you want to uphold a certain level of scholarship. At the same time, we’ve both

sat through meetings with historical consultants who want to keep researching a property to

death, or through a State Review Board meeting where board members might ask some really

esoteric questions that would be nice, perhaps, to answer at some point, but the answers are not

going to make the property more eligible than it is, without necessarily going down that rabbit

trail. A property isn’t more eligible to the National Register if it meets multiple criteria. It only

needs to be demonstrated that it meets criteria. So, while perhaps you could make an argument

for architectural significance and for historical significance, if one is more elusive, you may

pursue the easier path, because there’s a certain pragmatism that has to be involved, as well. So

it’s always a balancing act.

DG: There have been critics, certainly, to the National Register. Not just the folks that feel that

it’s too complicated, perhaps, for an average person to understand, but there have been other

critics in other quarters as well. How would you characterize the significant weaknesses, if any?

BB: Boy, I’m trying to think. You know, I think its weaknesses are actually its strength, because

it’s a single program that somehow has successfully addressed an incredible range of resource

types. And every corner of this nation—not just the lower forty-eight, but Alaska, Hawaii, the

Marianna Islands, the territories—and the resource types that are placed on the National Register

in other parts of the country might be very different from the resource types that are placed here.

So, designing a program that can somehow address all of that is, I think, really quite genius. But

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it means that it’s going to have some flaws and imperfections, and the attorneys that sometimes

take us to task because they’re representing someone who doesn’t want a property listed, or

[chuckles]

DG: Or perhaps the other way around.

BB: Or perhaps the other way around—really want it listed and we can’t see the significance—

are mystified by all this. But somehow, as historians that work in this program, we learn to walk

that fine line where you could live with some of the inconsistencies, because you could see the

greater good, you could see where it was really coming together.

DG: Over your long tenure with the program, what Minnesota nominations stand out to you,

either because of their basic significance, or perhaps because of some sort of controversy or

discussion, or any other reason.

BB: Boy. [Chuckles] You know, there are those that stand out because they were the

nominations that I did early in my career. We already talked about that early career stretch. I

think some that maybe stand out in more recent years would be maybe the hidden jewels. I

remember being absolutely blown away by the scenic drops that are intact in the building down

in Winona, the Masonic Hall. (I can’t remember the historic name—I’ll look that up.) But, it just

astounded me, to think that all these years later, after this program has been in place for so

long—this was only nominated fairly recently. There was many a State Review Board meeting

where I would listen to Susan give the history of the property and show slides and I would be

kind of blown away by realizing that—yes, these places are scattered around the Minnesota

landscape, and they are kind of diamonds in the rough, sometimes. I think some that have been

really interesting—I thought that the work that Rolf Anderson did on the WPA, CCC for the

state parks was some really stellar work. Certainly that resulted in a National Historic Landmark

listing for the Saint Croix that Rolf also did. I always liked seeing nominations come together

that were a collection of nominations. The one that is underway and had to of necessity, be left

somewhat undone was the Grand Rounds, that I’m hopeful will be planted on the National

Register before long. [Chuckles]

DG: And the process of getting properties listed on the National Register has involved a

continuing group of folks, called the State Review Board, a group of volunteers who contribute

many hours at public hearings. What has been your experience with that group over the years—

has that changed? What are the characteristics of an average State Review Board member?

BB: I think the State Review Board has changed. Again, we talked about it a little last week,

because the early years of the State Review Board were so different, when we were doing

monthly meetings, and we’d be in the Weyerhaeuser Room and everyone from… I mean, Tess

would be there, Russell and John, and all the rest. One of the things, the State Review Board and

that whole public process, I think, plays a really important role. Clearly the primary role is the

review role that they perform to assess whether the property meets the criteria for listing and

make that recommendation that it would be moving forward. But I think more than that it also

plays a really important role in providing a little bit of ceremony to the process. Nowhere else is

there any ceremony in having a property listed on the National Register, and it seems like it’s a

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process that needs a little ceremony. So, there was probably a greater sense of ceremony when

those meetings were conducted in the Weyerhaeuser Room, way back when, when the room was

more full and it was more well-attended by people in more of the administration, for instance,

than it is now. I was actually rather surprised when I came back and learned that the State

Review Board meeting had moved to the point where the director didn’t come any more. That

astounded me. I thought that surely should happen, but we’ve carried on, and there continues to

be a certain amount of ceremony, although some meetings are very poorly attended by members

of the public. Part of it is just the fact that in more recent years as funding was much more lean,

we were not doing as many nominations for any given meeting for consideration, so we didn’t

attract as many people from the public. But, I think that the board members themselves have

been very committed to the process. I think sometimes the meetings get a little long, and they

can get a little petty sometimes, [chuckles] editing by committee, or things of that nature, but any

time you bring people from different disciplines together and you’re asking them to comment

from their professional perspective on a nomination, the nominations that they’re reviewing are,

for the most part, really well-written, well-argued, so they’re trying to think of something to say

and sometimes that ends up being—Page 8, Section [chuckles] whatever. They don’t like the

way something is phrased or… but, I think, for the most part, it’s a group that’s pretty committed

to… I appreciated seeing how many professors we’ve had from the University of Minnesota and

from some of the other private colleges sit on that board. It’s been a way to foster those

relationships, and historic preservation needs the academics as well as the practitioners, and so I

think that that’s been really valuable. And I know that certainly some of the art historians that

have been on the board really appreciate the documentation that they’re taking back, the

perspective and the rigor that’s involved in pulling that documentation together. Not just the

architectural historians—there’s some amazing historical documentation arguments that are put

together for the nominations as well. You can’t read those nominations and not learn something

about Minnesota history.

DG: And just to kind of finalize our discussion on the National Register, do you have any

particular types of properties that you feel have been chronically under-represented, that need

attention in the future?

BB: We need to make more… I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about archeology. I’m

not an archeologist, but archeology is very under-represented on the National Register. Certainly,

I think part of the beauty of the National Register is that properties are always coming of age. So,

just as you start getting comfortable with a resource type—actually the WPA, the federal relief

era is a good example—when we were doing the survey back in the ‘70s, and ‘80s, we barely

looked at that era, because they were barely fifty years old, if that. Now they’ve become kind of

old hat. So now, it’s really the properties of more recent construction. We’re looking at the post-

World War II very different kind of properties. Properties that were never built to last, and now

we’re wanting to put them on the National Register. Kind of the disposable era of our more

recent century. [Chuckles] And, certainly, landscapes, designed landscapes. Other landscapes. I

think of the Manson nomination was a wonderful nomination. Traditional cultural properties.

Having just revised the statewide preservation plan, these are all the properties that rose again to

the surface, saying we need to make some headway on these. And I think that with the help of

the legacy funds, we’re going to be able to make some headway there, which is actually very

exciting.

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DG: The register really focuses on what we preserve. An oft-employed point in the preservation

planning process is then talking about how we preserve, and there are a number of programs that

are in place in the SHPO that deal more with the how than the what. And I think that two of the

more active ones are the tax incentive program, which, of course, was first available at the

federal level and now, most recently, at the state level. And then the other program is the

program whereby we consult with units of government as they are performing their own

planning functions to collaborate on how they can fulfill their preservation responsibilities under

Section 106. So let’s talk a little bit about both of those, and maybe you can just make some

observations about how well they’ve worked, about some problems that those areas have had,

and maybe speculate a little bit about where you see them going.

BB: Maybe I’ll comment first on the tax act, just because it’s been foremost in my mind with the

new state tax credit. But, obviously, the federal historic preservation tax credit has been in place

for a long time, and it’s had its highs and lows. In its early years, in the ‘70s, it really flourished.

It’s before some of the strings tightened up and made it more difficult for developers to take

advantage of the tax credits, but, in those early years of the program, I know Charlie Nelson was

processing many, many federal tax projects. But again, like the National Register program,

standards were a little more relaxed and so it was a very… it was the same program but a

different program in many ways. But I think when I first came back and was heading the

office—really, the tax credits had become very much kind of in the background in the office. It’s

not that we weren’t still doing tax projects, but they were very few in number. We might just

have a handful in any given year. Some important ones, yes, but we weren’t doing a lot of tax

credits. Just the economics of it were such that I don’t think for many developers it was worth

the trouble to go through all of that rigor to qualify for the credits. But with the passage of the

state tax credit in 2010, it all changed. All of a sudden, now it was not just a twenty percent tax

credit at the federal level, but it was a twenty percent tax credit at the state level as well. So, a

developer would be a fool not to pursue the tax credits. I think the challenge that it does, though,

is that all of a sudden historic preservation is being pursued—I don’t think it would be right to

say it’s for the wrong reason, but developers want to pursue the tax credits just because there’s

money there. So, it’s really the fiscal incentive driving the projects, and in many cases, the

properties that they’re seeking the credits for may not be good candidates for the National

Register. And the National Register is the lynchpin. They have to be listed on the National

Register, it’s not even just eligible for listing. So, it creates a tension, and it has certainly fueled

the demand for National Register nominations. I’ve always thought there ought to be a way for

properties that are already on the National Register to just kind of leap to the front and be

rehabbed first, but that’s in my dreams. It doesn’t work that way. [Chuckles] Even though we

would try to make that happen by doing nominations for historic districts, in the commercial

areas, for instance, thinking that that would make it that much easier for the property owners in

that area to pursue the development of their properties. What’s been interesting to learn,

though—it’s been a real education for me in the more recent years to see how developers really

avail themselves of the tax credits. It’s not really the property owners that are necessarily the

drivers behind the tax projects, it’s usually some larger developer that’s pursuing a really large

project. And the challenge has been in making historic preservation tax credits work for those

small projects. I think, really, the future of the program, though—really, if it’s going to be

successful, it’s got to take off at the local level with the small projects, too. That’s where it is

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really needed. The really large, multi-million dollar projects—yes, there’s a lot of money on the

line because of the credits, and it’ll help those projects, whether it’s the Ford Plant or the… some

of these big projects that we’re looking at—the Cedar Riverside, I mean talk about a big

project… but, if it’s not going to help the businesses on main street, I think we’ve missed the

mark. And making that work is the real challenge in this program.

DG: And, in addition to offering an additional incentive, how have the state credits changed the

way the program works for the owner or for the developer?

BB: Fortunately, the tax credit that was passed in Minnesota mirrors the federal tax credit. There

were the… probably ten years went into the lobbying effort to try to enact a state tax credit, and

in those years we saw lots of different variations proposed, and not all of them would have

mirrored the federal credit, and I think it’s a really good thing that what finally did get passed

mirrors the federal credit, because if that hadn’t been the case, we’d have faced a situation where

we might have had double standards, where you might have a project qualify for the state credit

but not the federal credit. The first qualification is that the property has to qualify for the federal

credit in order to be eligible for the state credit. So, that has married the programs, but it doesn’t

mean that it isn’t without some challenge. The biggest challenge has just been staffing up for it.

And the fact that we had to hit the ground running. You know, the bill was signed into law on

April 1st, and it was effective in May, [chuckles] and we’d been operating a kind of stumbling

federal program for so long that we weren’t really ready to just leap in with the kind of

aggressive training and marketing and all the rest that it would have been nice to have been able

to mobilize, but we wouldn’t have been able to do that at that time. It actually got lots of

publicity without having to do a formal marketing plan, but we did… a couple things that

happened—we did last year retain the services of a group down at the university in Mankato that

has done an economic impact analysis of the tax credit and the results of their analysis were very

positive, and we did have a kind of public unveiling of that first report last fall. It was well-

received and I think is going to be really helpful as the legislature looks at this, and one of the

things about the new state tax credit is that it sunsets in five years. So, it’ll go away. It was

passed as part of the economic stimulus package, so if it’s not… I mean, the effort to keep a state

tax credit is going to have to be a sustained effort or it’ll go away. I think, certainly, it’s helping

to make these projects more viable, and that’s only good for preservation. But, I have to be

honest and say that in the office it doesn’t come without a certain amount of angst and

frustration, because it’s not an easy program to administer. It tends to be riddled with less than

patient developers and their attorneys. Their demands are hard to service. The other thing is it’s

against the backdrop of the current economy, and even the banking industry—I had bankers

calling me wanting to know if I could give them a copy of a certain letter that would give them

the assurance that this developer was going to get the credit, and I would be trying to explain—

they’ll only get the credit if they get the federal credit, and it’s not done until the work is done. It

could be disqualified by the National Park Service a month after the [part III’s submitted], if they

don’t follow through as planned. If they try to pull something, you know.

DG: So the stakes are high.

BB: So the stakes are high, and everyone wants certainty. There aren’t a lot of certainties in the

tax credit program. But it is a very important tool. I think probably the more important tool—I

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don’t know that I’d call it a tool, but it’s really the local government program. Our office has

always held the position that really the most effective protection takes place locally, closer to the

resource. We have over fifty local ordinances in the state. When you consider we have—what—

over 900 municipalities, it’s a pretty small percentage, but among those fifty there are—these are

round numbers, my real numbers I’ll look up when I’m doing my editing—but these local

programs are doing some really important work. Some of them have been in place a very long

time, when you think of Minneapolis and Saint Paul and Red Wing and Faribault and any

number of communities that have been at the preservation effort for quite a long time. They’re

doing some really good work. I’ve always seen our role in the preservation office as being to

equip and empower our local partners. When I think about where this might be going in the

future, I’ve always wished that there was a way that the federal regs allow it, but I’ve always

wished that there was a way that the local program could assume some more responsibilities.

Much as the tribes assumed more responsibilities. I thought it would be really nice if some of

these local programs could assume some of the compliance responsibilities, for instance. It

would not be inconceivable to develop an agreement with some of these, particularly the

programs that have professional staff. Those that do are in the minority, and I understand that

some of the cities like to use us as the big bad wolf, just as we use the park service some days.

[Chuckles] Sometimes it’s easier to say no when you have to check with another authority, or to

deliver the news that’s not going to be popular.

DG: One of the ways that the state office, I think, has really cultivated the relationships with the

local governments is through an annual conference that has now been going on for many years.

BB: Many years—decades.

DG: That, I think, has helped create the sense of a preservation community, statewide, where the

different parts of the preservation system have a sort of a common meeting place. It’s always

struck me that that’s one place to learn about how complex the business of preservation is.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about that meeting as it evolved over the years.

BB: Sure. It has evolved, and when the conference started, it was really training for the local

government programs. So, in those early years it catered entirely to the local, certified local

governments. In fact, one of the requirements for a certified local government to stay certified is

to attend annual training that’s provided by our office, and we basically said that the annual

conference satisfies that. There are other ways that they can satisfy that, but the annual

conference is certainly the easiest. But, I think that the annual conference certainly still attracts

that audience, but it’s attracting a larger audience, now. It’s also drawing in people from the

county and local historical societies, to a degree, more planners from the cities that maybe don’t

have local programs, as well as agency personnel and just kind of a wide range—and just people

who are just interested citizens. One of the things that we started doing now, quite a long time

ago, was moving the location of the conference around. It always moved around to a certain

extent, but it seemed that it was more in the Twin Cities than it was anywhere else. Actually, we

started moving around probably in the ‘90s, when we were still out at Fort Snelling. Cities

almost compete for having it held in their location. In fact, we got chambers of commerce calling

the office and wanting to host the annual conference in their city. And my answer is always—

pass an ordinance and we’ll be there. [Chuckles] We need to uphold some standard. Rochester

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really wanted us, and we wouldn’t go to Rochester, because Rochester has not yet enacted a local

ordinance, and we thought we were rewarding the wrong thing if we just give in to that. What it

does is it showcases different communities each year, at a different location, and it gives the…

we’re finding people love going to these communities, spending a couple nights, exploring what

the city has to offer. I think last year when we were down in Faribault it was really a pleasant

surprise for everyone, to think that downtown Faribault could be such an attractive location for a

preservation conference. And I think, in the case of Faribault, not only is it a city with a really

longstanding preservation program, but they’re also one of the new Main Street cities. The Main

Street program has been reinvigorated with help from the legacy funds in partnership with the

Preservation Alliance. Main Street brings not only the preservation piece to the table, but it also

brings more of the promotion and marketing and some of the other components that kind of work

hand-in-hand to help revitalize the downtown. So, very satisfying to be able to be in that kind of

a location, but I think there’s always that sense of the city that’s hosting showcases what it’s all

about, but you also are showcasing case studies from other communities. At any given time there

seems to be themes kind of running across the land when it comes to historic preservation,

whether it’s issues regarding certain kinds of resources or certain circumstances, or in recent…

how do you promote the economic benefits of preservation, for instance, has been a recurring

theme at conferences, and sessions cover that, as well as—how do you educate elected officials,

how do you engage the media—all of these topics. It really becomes kind of a learning form.

And we use part of one day at the conference, we get out and see the community. So, tours are

always an important part of that. And we try to be in a historic place. That means that sometimes

things don’t go quite as smoothly. It can be a little bumpy when you’re not necessarily in a

location that is used to having 150 or 200 people descend for a meeting, [chuckles] but

preservationists are used to adapting.

DG: One of the subjects that I think that has been often presented at those conferences is the

concept of a reuse study, and the office, I think, kind of pioneered that process, developed that

process, got a little bit of notoriety, nationally, about how the office here was working on finding

solutions for underutilized historic buildings. How about that program—what did you see as its

major accomplishments?

BB: You know, what I really thought the reuse study program, what its greatest strength was was

that it was a very pragmatic approach for looking for preservation solutions that didn’t require an

enormous sum of money and an enormous span of time within which the study would be

completed. It almost was a SWAT team approach to looking for preservation solutions. We did

pioneer it, but we didn’t pioneer it alone. It’s patterned after a program that the National Trust

had initiated. Early-on we picked it up in partnership also with the Preservation Alliance as a

way—by partnering with the Preservation Alliance it gave us an opportunity to give the

Preservation Alliance greater visibility and helped bolster their presence in the preservation

community as well, and they became another partner in the mix in those early reuse studies that

were done. But, boy, over the years we’ve done dozens and dozens of reuse studies, and we’ve

done them—some of the studies the preservation office has had a very visible presence in. In

more recent years that presence has been less. When Charlie Nelson was on the staff, he was

almost always on the team. John Lauber was almost always on the team when he was in the

office. It became, because of our small staff, it really became a luxury to send a staff person to

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serve on the team. So, in more recent years the framework of the study has gone on, but we

haven’t necessarily had someone at a seat at the table.

DG: So, typically, one of those studies would start out with a derelict historic building in a

community, and someone got interested in it, perhaps the office or a local organization or

another state department, and so the team tackled the question—So, what about this building?

What kinds of surprises did some of the teams find?

BB: What’s interesting is the study process seems to work the best when the people that are

behind the study don’t have too strong a preconceived notion of what they want the study to tell

them. The studies that I saw derail through the process were those where the people behind the

study thought—we want this to be our new library, so let’s prove that it’ll work here, rather than

looking at the resource and then looking at the community’s needs and how they nest together.

How might this building serve real needs in the community; are the resources there to make it

happen; what will it take; and what might be the range of uses? A library might be in the mix,

but it may not be the preferred. If you go to the study with a real kind of tightly held opinion

about what you want the outcome to be, it kind of sets you up for disappointment or disaster, if

that ends up not being the case.

DG: Would the Veblen study be an example of that?

BB: Actually, the Veblen study, I thought, was a very good one. Because, in that case, we didn’t

really know… in some ways it was a different kind of a reuse study, because —what are you

going to use the Veblen farmstead for? It was really wrestling with the question… should this…

how do you… what do you do with this kind of a property that’s a national historic landmark.

DG: That’s owned by a non-profit.

BB: It’s owned by a non-profit. You’d think that this was the perfect solution.

DG: They have big plans.

BB: They have big plans, but they have no money, and they’re aging, and they’re running out of

steam, and before long they’re going to lose it to the bank, if they don’t do something. And there

are these kind of long-held-out notions that certainly either Carleton or Saint Olaf will take it on,

because it’s an important… Thorstein Veblen attended Carleton College, and Norwegian

heritage—you know it’s a natural for Saint Olaf—certainly one of these nearby colleges would

take it on, but that wasn’t the case. The thing that I found really great that came out of the Veblen

process was that it kind of legitimized the notion that this property could go back into private

ownership and that would be OK. So, that really got the wheels in motion, but it also identified

when Marion Nelson was on the team, and got so excited by what he was seeing in that house, I

think all of us became excited about kind of other qualities of the property, that it really was kind

of a document to the Norwegian-American experience, in a way that we’d not seen it before. We

just knew its association with Veblen. We hadn’t really looked in that way at the house itself. At

the fact that it’s, on the exterior, a Greek Revival American farmhouse, and on the interior

there’s nothing symmetrical or Greek Revival about it. It’s all a very Norwegian—entirely

41

different. It says something very different inside. And so, I think, in finding… the reuse study

really set the stage. I think, had we not gone through that process, had Marion Nelson not been

part of that, I don’t know if we ever would have discovered kind of the real magic of that place,

which is kind of interesting. Because then when Bill Melton did acquire it and hired Steve

Edwins and River City Builders and all the rest to do the project—they did such a loving

restoration of that house. It’s a real rich resource that tells a story that’s way beyond the story of

the Veblen family. And certainly the Veblen family story was worth telling all in its own right.

But that was a different kind of reuse study. The other one that kind of reminded me a little bit of

the Veblen one was the other kind of agricultural farmhouse that was in trouble, and that was the

Grimm farmstead. And there, you had one that was in public ownership. It wasn’t going to go

out of public ownership, but if you will recall, the Hennepin County Parks that owned it was

more worried about the liability and the kids getting in there and starting fires and doing what

kids shouldn’t be doing out in the country late at night, and they wanted to knock it down and

plant some alfalfa. So, there it was really convincing the whole administration that somehow

historic resources could be within the mission of the Hennepin County parks, and that if they

would preserve the farmhouse and find a way to interpret it, it could enrich the experience for

visitors to the park. But it wasn’t the typical reuse. It’s not the reuse where—OK, here we have a

building on Main Street—what kind of function might go into it? But the reuse study is a

problem solving process.

DG: In some ways those two examples mirror one another, where the Veblen house went from a

non-profit who intended to interpret it to a very different type of use, and the Grimm farm went

from a pretty passive use within a park to an interpreted site.

BB: Right, exactly, it’s very interesting.

DG: So, the outcome could really proceed as the site …

BB: But, what it took was some focused attention to think about this resource. And I think that’s

really the genius of the reuse study. It’s not… it’s that you bring together a team of people who

have kind of different perspectives on the problem solving that needs to happen, and through an

interview process they try to flesh out what’s really going. A rather intensive interview process,

it usually takes place over the period of two-to-three days. But all of this happens within about a

week’s time. Then, there’s some going back and writing up their sections of the report, but it

probably gets done in about ten weeks, maybe, eight-to-ten weeks. Not very many processes

allow some meaningful problem solving to occur in that kind of window of time.

DG: And with a pretty high degree of flexibility.

BB: Yes. It doesn’t pretend to have all the answers, but the assumption is this is a valuable

resource. It really deserves the time and attention to think about—how can we come up with a

preservation solution? The reason that they’re doing the study is that either the building is

imminently threatened, or it’s horribly under-utilized. Those are kind of the triggers. We actually

in the office had—we would sometimes give grants to someone, to a community or a non-profit

or some party to initiate the reuse study process, and the way that they would apply—we had

kind of a revolving door for applications, and it’s not that we had a set amount of money and a

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formal application process, but it was more that we’d held aside enough money so that if there

was really a need to do a reuse study we could do one. So that was kind of how it was. And it

wasn’t a grant in the true sense of the word, but it was a way to do a kind of a cooperative

project, where we would be a partner and the sponsoring party would be a partner, and the kinds

of projects that really received the most favorable treatment in that kind of setting were those

where there was really a willingness to listen to what the reuse study showed. Sometimes reuse

studies became a tool in the toolbox for agencies that were maybe doing compliance reviews.

They saw them as mitigation—this building’s going to probably have to come down, let’s do a

reuse study and prove we can’t do anything with it. Wrong idea for a reuse study! [laughter]

That’s not why you do a reuse study. You don’t do it to prove that you can’t preserve the

building. You do it because you want to have an open mind and think what could preserve this

building, and the one that comes to my mind that’s a really good example of that is Gail

Middleston, out in Carver County. Again, another farmhouse, but what are you going to do with

this? And here, it’s owned by a federal agency, and they don’t really see it in their best interest to

have to hang onto this house. It’s too bad it couldn’t become the education center that they’d

originally hoped, but it’s still standing. I always think that if you can keep it standing, kind of

wiser minds could prevail. That’s always the best. If you don’t have kind of an immediate plan,

just keep the building standing. Just don’t let it go. Once you let it go, it’s gone.

DG: So many buildings have sat for years until just the right solution happened to come along.

BB: Right. We have too short a fuse. What we need to do is just hang on a little—think about—

we could go on and on naming the ones that languished a long time, whether it’s the Schubert

Theatre or the depot in downtown Minneapolis or any number of buildings in the warehouse

district.

DG: And many of those were owned by the government. Let’s touch just briefly on the program

of consultation with government agencies, particularly federal and state agencies under the

consultation process, 106.

BB: The one we call the review and compliance.

DG: [ ].

BB: You know, I think review and compliance—you’ve had as much if not more experience

with review and compliance than I have, but the way that I have seen the review and compliance

function kind of nest in all of the complement of programs is that it places the responsibility on

the agency for historic preservation. It makes them, kind of, the sometimes kicking and

screaming partners in the whole piece, but it firmly places that responsibility on the agency, the

owner of the property or the sponsor of the action, and it’s not perfect, but they have to consider

alternatives if there are going to be adverse impacts. It’s a process. Many times I have to

remind—in fact, when I first started reporting to Pat Garter on the last reorganization after

Michael Fox retired, one day I told her that process is her friend. I said the thing you have to

remember about review and compliance is that it’s a process. If people are not happy with it, you

start and you go through the …If you’re going through the steps and you just keep going through

the steps, you know where you are and you keep going, and you go to it with an open mind, look

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at the options—but it’s a process that will unfold and at each step, depending on what the finding

is, you move on to the next step in the process. That keeps you moving one foot ahead of the

other. Sometimes it’s painful, but you do get through the process. Review and compliance—it’s

relentless. The volume of compliance has been staggering—what? five thousand reviews in

2010? I can’t remember what the numbers were for stimulus projects. It’s kind of the perfect

storm. Certainly situations such as the 35W bridge collapse, where all of a sudden time and

money just have to forge through. Do whatever it takes to get that review done so that the new

bridge can go up, and I know in that instance, that collapse really changed the way that MNDOT

looked at their projects, and that changed MNDOT’s attitude about bridges and compliance in

general.

DG: It certainly creates a lot of conversations with a lot of different players …

BB: Yes, it does.

DG:… with the potential to affect preservation.

BB: And it also brings in other parties. It’s a very public process, it requires public participation

and many, many times the issues are because the public hasn’t been consulted, or some agency is

trying to ramrod it through. I think what makes the process often difficult is that it’s complex and

many times a project gets… as it gets started you have no idea that it’s going to become a federal

project. There may be not a single federal program involved and then somewhere after it’s quite

a ways into the… the momentum has really started gaining and it becomes a federal project, and

people are not happy when they have to slow down and identify resources and do a survey and

all the rest.

DG: Oftentimes this goes back to what you said, I think, at the beginning, but oftentimes I’ve

heard over the years that people react that it’s rather strange that a federal agency, or in some

cases a state agency, is actually doing surveys on its own project and making assessments of

effect on its own project. I think you pointed out that in some cases that’s the genius of the

program, because there’s some responsibility taken by that agency, and I think that’s one of the

complexities of working with historic preservation, when you’re working with historic properties

that are owned by so many different people, including government agencies, and who does take

that responsibility.

BB: Right. I think the frustrating part of the compliance program, for me, was the finger

pointing. Because many times the agencies or the elected officials—they wanted to point the

finger at our office and say—SHPO’s holding us up again! [chuckles] But, it’s a lack of

understanding about the process, and about whose responsibility it really is to carry out this

work. But it’s also a balancing act. I know after you left the office and Mary Ann joined the staff

and… I spent more time, probably, doing compliance when Mary Ann joined and during that

period when you left, just because it was kind of on autopilot for those many years you did it. So,

Mary Ann and I had a lot of conversations about how the process works and how you kind of

stay the higher ground. It’s real easy to get kind of dragged down into the mire and the scrappy

battles of compliance, but you’ve got to stay on the high ground and you’ve got to remember

what you are there for, what your role is, what the purpose is, and also ask the question—Is this

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going to pass the test of reasonableness? The program, I think, always has a certain vulnerability,

and the vulnerability is that the laws could change. They’re not perfect, but they do pretty well at

protecting resources, but if people really are unhappy with the process we could lose some of

those strengths. And certainly in the current environment, when a lot of elected officials are not

very happy about things like regulation, I think programs like the compliance function could

really be vulnerable. So, for those of us that administer programs like that, it’s really incumbent

to make sure we’re doing them in a very upright way and asking those questions about… or

having a reality check or a test of reasonableness. Does this make sense to the common…

someone who comes in from the outside and doesn’t know anything about this—can we explain

this so that it makes sense?

DG: And in some cases, perhaps, show that the agency is accomplishing some greater public

good work through the results.

BB: Yes. We’ve both been at [NIXBO] meetings where somebody will waltz in with a stack of [

] reports and say—Garbage! [chuckles] This is garbage! What did we learn—how many

hundreds of thousands of dollars—this is garbage! And that doesn’t serve the program well.

There’s an awful lot of good work that’s being done as a result of the compliance program.

DG: And that focuses on relationships primarily with federal and state agencies, sometimes with

local government. Another aspect of the outreach part of the office has been out of the SHPO

realm, but more working with the county and the local historical societies in a program that

actually goes back even further than the SHPO program.

BB: Goes back much further than the SHPO program. What’s interesting is certainly the local

history section is a really important section of the office. When I first became the department

head, one of my goals was to find a way to better integrate it in the whole department. Dave

Nystuen was kind of off on his little—he’d do his thing, the rest of us would do our thing, and

we were certainly colleagues that got along well, but there wasn’t that integration. It started

happening, I think, as Charlie and David started traveling more together, and that was partly

facilitated because of health concerns and trying to be a little more efficient in terms of… just

resources. Let’s make these visits around the state a little more so that Charlie and David aren’t

going separate ways all the time. Let’s do them together so that at the local organizations they’re

understanding the preservation issues better and vice versa. So, that was kind of the first step

towards better integration, and as a result of that we also started combining the annual meeting of

the local historical organizations and the preservation conference, and they became kind of back-

to-back for a number of years. When we started taking the training for local historical

organizations on the road and going to various locations around the state, we later teamed that up

with the public meetings we held for the preservation office, so there was more integration. It

was probably at that stage integration that was more of a convenience than kind of intentional,

but it was finding those natural places where we could make it work. But it was also doing

programming at the training for both groups, back and forth, so that what we were finding was

that many times the first call of distress, when a property would be threatened, would be to the

local historical organization, and they wouldn’t know what to do. They would do the best they

could, but they would kind of throw their hands up or they would be afraid to really stick their

neck out because it’s a small community and it might be—perhaps it was the county that wanted

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to tear down a court house, and it’s the county historical society and they don’t want to get into

the middle of a battle with the organization that they receive a lot of funding from. So, you’ve

got those dynamics at play. So, we would do training on… trying to help local organizations

know how to be better stewards and how to better understand how historic preservation worked.

I think in more recent years it’s been even more integrated, and certainly the grants have helped

make that happen. That’s the last major portion of the department—it’s kind of ironic that we are

leaving it till last, because it’s really the program that kind of, what, supersized? And has now

eaten the entire department? [Chuckles]

DG: Um hum, yup.

BB: I don’t know how else to put it.

DG: A nice job, to have to distribute funding.

BB: Yes! It’s always been the feel-good part of the job. The grants program—actually when I

became… I think one of the first things that happened when I became the deputy SHPO and the

head of the department was Governor Carlson vetoed the grants program. I remember I was on

my first trip out in the field with Charlie and David, and David was introducing me to the

historical societies down in southeastern Minnesota. I think we were at the Houston County

Historical Society, and a distress call came in from Donn Coddington, with serious news. He got

me on the phone—Governor Carlson had vetoed the grants program, and this was not good

news. At the time, the funding level—this was the grants program that had been in place since

1969, and the funding level was… we were awarding maybe $240,000 or thereabouts, if I’m

remembering correctly, annually. And the governor line-item vetoed it. So, this had immediate

ramifications. In fact, Tim Glines, who was the grants manager at the time, had just totally

rewritten the grants manual, and it was literally in envelopes and in the mail. It was in the mail

room, so Beverly went and fetched them all back from the mail room, and we didn’t mail the

grants manual out, because, obviously, everything was up in the air. We didn’t know what would

happen. But that was a real blow and a huge setback. We were successful a year later in getting

back some funding. It’s almost laughable, what we got back. It was funded again the following

year at $50,000. So, for then, a number of years, for quite a long period of time, the grants

program was funded at between $46,000 and $50,000 a year. I think one year it went up to

$58,000, but these are really modest funds, and at level, we had to rethink. First of all, we lost

the position of grants manager, so we had to rethink how we did everything. And that was also, I

think, what precipitated me being thrust into the grants office to the degree that I was. All of a

sudden we didn’t have a full-blown grants program any more. But we had to do something, and

we didn’t have anybody to do it, and so as department head, you kind of move to where you’re

needed. And that was really the event that thrust me into the grants office in a big way. But then

we had to think—OK, how are we going to administer a grants program of this small scale? Just

the mechanisms for it change. We actually suspended the grants review committee that year. I

think we called them together just to review certified local government grants that winter. But we

didn’t have anything to award in funds. And so, we didn’t even fill terms. We just said—Why

don’t you just stay on another year until we find out what happens. So, our term cycle got a little

out of synch that year. Beverly and I worked on the grants then, and we decided… a couple

things—first of all, at that funding level we couldn’t possibly have nine categories of eligible

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activity. There was no way. And the expertise in the office was mostly in historic preservation

and the demand for grants was largest in the historic preservation area. So, we limited the

categories that were eligible and we kind of kept it to historic properties and I think we also did

microfilm. We opened up one of the other categories in a very modest way. So, it just became a

very, very small grants program. But then one of the strategies to kind of bring back grant

funding was to go after capital funds, and that was really a strategy of John Wood’s, and I think

it was a very smart thing to do. The first year that it happened was in 1993, and 1993 capital

grants were not really all that well conceived, but it was a start. Basically, what John Wood

wanted—he asked one day for a list of—OK, who could use grants? And so, David and Charlie

and I sat down and came up with a list of like twenty-three places around the state that we

thought could use money. That became the request. And we never talked to these people. They

just became—they were just on our list, and so Bev and I used to kind of laugh, and when we got

the money, we would say—OK, this is the good news and the bad news. The good news is that

you’ve got $8,000 to work on whatever the historic places for this little organization. The bad

news is you have to match it. [Chuckles] But we’ll help you, and you don’t have to do it by

tomorrow, and so we had this list. For some reason the number twenty-three is sticking in my

mind. I think there were twenty-three of them on that cycle. One of them, actually, was the Edna

G. I remember going up with Donn Coddington to meet with the folks at Two Harbors, and they

were furious that we had gotten them this money. And of course they were on the list because we

knew that this tugboat was threatened, and we thought if they got some grant money it would

help leverage some positive things for preservation. But the city council was not happy with me,

because they wanted to take it out of the water and put it in a park.

DG: Did they turn the money back?

BB: They didn’t turn the money back, and actually we decided they needed more money, so then

we went after some LCMR funding and we got them more money to do a reuse study and more

strategic thinking about that whole resource. Actually we got… Grimm was on that list—there

were a lot of properties on that list. So that was kind of the first little foray into capital grants.

And they were very small. Capital grants are really intended to be major capital expenditures.

Grants of $4,000, $8,000 are not major capital projects. So then, in 1995, we received the first

capital appropriation for really what is still now the state capital grants. The name of the program

is the County and Local Preservation Projects Grants. We always, as shorthand, call it the capital

grants. But, we’ve now been successful in continuing to leverage capital grants. The thing about

the capital grants program is that for entities to be eligible for the capital grants they have to be

public entities. So, it really only benefits properties that are in public ownership. It has benefitted

a lot of historic courthouses, city halls, schools, bridges, water towers, all these kinds of

publically owned buildings. It has helped some facilities that are owned by counties or cities that

are perhaps managed by a local historical organization, you know, things like—the New Ulm

Post Office that’s the home to the Brown County Historical Society has received capital grants.

At the same time that we received that, we also received a special appropriation to match federal

enhancement funds, so, kind of ISTEA matching grants. So, all the sudden, here we have the

state grant-in-aid program is shrunk to $48,000, but we’re getting larger grants for different kinds

of properties that are kind of really supplementing and putting kind of a whole new spin on the

grants program, and really enabling some really exciting projects to happen. So …

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DG: Give us a few examples of turn-arounds.

BB: I’m thinking of like the courthouse out in Pipestone. Some really important work got done

out there. The city hall in Richland. And places like the Universal Laboratories out in Dassel.

They were some of the early recipients of the capital grants, and it’s now an interpretive center

that tells the story of ergot. Some fascinating properties, but the list could go on and on. Mandy

joined the staff in—I think it was 1997, so kind of early in the life of the capital grants program,

someone who really had solid grants administration experience, and so… but we had to totally

develop new guidelines, so it’s like every time we got new sorts of funding we had to come up

with a whole new way of doing things and writing our guidelines and working with the business

office and developing the agreements. Working with capital grants is whole another ball game,

because of the capital dollars involved, and the responsibilities that come with that.

DG: So you’ve worked with certified local government grants, which are federal grants, you’ve

worked with state capital grants, you’ve worked with state non-capital grants, and now most

recently you’re working with a lot of legacy funds.

BB: Right. And we’ve left out a couple categories. We’ve left out things like the federal

lighthouse grants and we’ve left out the federal disaster relief and the tornado disaster relief

allocation that we received in 1998 after the devastating tornado down in Saint Peter, where we

received a half a million dollars. Or was it a whole million—I think it was a whole million. My

mind is forgetting these things. We received a million dollars, and then we received another

$300,000 or $350,000 from some funds that were allocated the year later. Some major work was

done down there in legacy grants. The grants office has been super-sized. And the legacy grants

really are amazing. When I think about just the amount—first of all, the amount of money, what

the potential is to really reshape how history and historic preservation are done in this state for

the next twenty-five years. The first biennium of the legacy grants appropriation, when the office

received $6.75 million for grants—that is phenomenal, and I’m extremely proud of the way we

were able to administer those funds. We were able to hit the ground running, get materials

together, get guidelines out, and issue, conduct meetings all around the state, get feedback. Those

dollars got out doing the work of preservation and history in incredibly short order. I think it’s a

credit to the staff and in this—what’s been interesting with the legacy grants—these other grants

programs we always did all on our own. Nobody ever helped us. I mean, nobody… certainly we

worked with the contract office and we would work with the finance office, but they leaned on us

to do it all. With the legacy grants, folks were leaning on us, but Michael Fox was at the table,

David Kelleher was, Matt Hill was—so other players at the historical society were certainly on

our team as we labored to put all this together and when we would run into difficulties, Michael

made it really clear that he wanted me to let him know immediately, because we couldn’t have

any difficulties in giving these funds out. The success of the program would really be in our

ability to get the money out, because the public would not be happy if it wasn’t doing what it was

supposed to do.

DG: The program was certainly highly visible.

BB: Yes. And not only was it highly visible, but it was also being watched under a microscope. I

think we were all very keenly aware that everyone was watching every move. I can remember

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going to an Easter brunch and somebody asking me about how we were distributing the funds,

and I’m sitting here thinking—this person doesn’t even know what I do, hardly, and they are

paying attention to this.

DG: Did the nature of the applicants… did you see a lot of new applicants coming in?

BB: We did. We saw… and that’s been part of the interesting challenge of the whole program,

because certainly we saw the applicants we had seen before, and at our first pass the guidelines

really are kind of a hybrid of the kinds of guidelines we had for the state grant-in-aid and the

certified local government grant and the capital grants program, all wrapped together. So

basically anything that those other programs could have funded could be funded under these

programs, whether it was survey, or collections care, or oral history, or an interpretation project,

or bricks and mortar—you name it, the range of eligible projects is great. I lost my train of

thought—where was I going with that?

DG: You were talking about the applicants.

BB: About the applicants. So, certainly we saw the folks we’d seen in other programs, but we

also saw lots of new people, people for the first time thinking—I bet there’s something I can get

a grant for. And people thinking—some of the new applicants are really exciting to see, because

we’re able to fund things we hadn’t funded before. We’re able to really do history, too, at a

whole new level. So, the University of Minnesota’s applying for grants—large entities that

would never have wasted their time trying to apply for a $4,000 grant are interested in seeking

funds from this program. So, we’re seeing all different kinds of applicants.

DG: That’s certainly a new day for …

BB: Yeah. And the other thing is, though, when I say that it super-sized the grants program—we

also had to come up with a way to deal with it, and I think one of the last things that we did while

I was at the society last year is we had to revamp the grants administration process, and so we

moved—we introduced a whole new on-line, open source software program called Flux, that has

really flexible and robust capabilities, and it was thrilling to put it in place, and I actually—it’s

one of the things that I, the more I worked with Flux, the more I thought this would be really

exciting to see how we could apply this program in other programs that we do. I could see it

functioning in almost all areas of our program, because we needed more tools for tracking. What

we did in order to get the grants program up and running in the kind of time we had is we just

had to patch something together. So, we thought, first of all, we can’t—there’s no way with this

volume—500-plus applications. The old grants programs, people would send us twenty hard

copies of every grant application. Imagine what it would be like if we were dealing with hard

copies? So it all had to be electronically submitted. So we did it with a drop box and just all these

different systems, but it was patched together. We managed, but it was… Mandy and I would

kind of laugh and call us the Just-in-Time Grants Office, because it was always—we were

always on top of it, but it was just in time that it would be ready for everyone that needed to use

it, and we both knew that this was not sustainable. So, we began talking quite awhile ago with

Michael and with Rose about what we could do to really kind of reengineer how we would do

grants in the office. So, that was kind of one of the finishing projects, and they are using that

49

program now. In fact, one of the projects we did, actually, with federal funds this year is

developed—Mandy was telling me they just finished this—they were developing a module, a

grants administration module, that will bring the federal program grants administration into Flux

more fully, since that’s not legacy. Legacy funds are doing all this other stuff, so we had to use

federal funds for that piece.

DG: Well, that’s a far cry from the beginnings of the grants program when Mork—the Mork

reports came out in the ‘60s and led to that.

BB: I should actually say, too, that in the beginnings in the grants program, the Historic

Preservation Fund funded major grants. That was really before the layoffs. That chapter of the

grants program was when it was Henry Heron, and grants was not in the SHPO office. But, lots

of federal dollars went into historic properties in those early years in the program, at the same

time we were out doing surveys. But, certainly the grants are an incredible tool, and I’m kind of

excited to think of what they will… It also, though, for me, when the voluntary separation was

offered last year, it for me was a time when I thought—this is a new season. If there’s a time to

kind of step down and let someone else take the reins, this is probably a good time. I thought, I

can end this cycle well and leave it to the next generation of staff to take this on. So, when I left

we had just revived the statewide preservation plan. We were now into the next biennium of

legacy grants and Flux was functioning, and so, it was time.

DG: One of the things that you mentioned when you were going through some of the

conversations around your transition, was a special interest in social justice and historic

preservation issues.

BB: Um hum.

DG: Talk a little bit about that and what you’re interested in.

BB: It’s something that… I’ve always had an interest in social justice, and social justice

intersects with historic preservation in lots of ways that it’s not always readily apparent. And

what I’ve often found is that some of the projects to me that are the most satisfying are those

where that intersection takes place. One of the first tax credit projects that applied under the new

state tax credit program was Aeon, who does affordable housing, applied for tax credits for the

O’Donnell Shoe Company building in Saint Paul. This is a tax project that I found especially

satisfying, because here you’re going to have affordable housing for—I think it’s providing

seventy units, and something like seven or eight (I don’t know where the exact numbers are) are

actually going to house formerly homeless people. And what I find so satisfying about this is that

people who need affordable housing should be able to live in places that are historic buildings.

Too often, affordable housing is in what I would consider kind of substandard or not very high

quality when it comes to the design and the environment, and to me it’s very satisfying to think

that, OK, our first use of the new state tax credit, paired with the federal credits, are actually

providing affordable housing for people in downtown Saint Paul, and they’re breathing new life

into this wonderful shoe factory. That’s just one example of where social justice comes together.

And I think the other thing that has struck me as I think about social justice and historic

preservation is that so often historic preservation is criticized as something that is really elitist.

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And it can be. The work of preservation can be expensive. Many times it’s the grand homes in

the grand neighborhoods that surround the lakes or places like Summit Avenue, and so it just

seems to have a disconnect with issues of social justice and some of those other currents in our

culture that so desperately need attention and some solutions. I keep thinking that historic

preservation really can and should be the solution more often than it is. So, as I embark on my

new chapter, I’ve given some thought to maybe writing about this; maybe that’s a place to start.

But so many of our historic resources are in our inner cities, and our inner cities are some of the

areas where some of the biggest social struggles take place, where some of those issues are really

front and center. If the historic buildings can be part of the solution, I think we’re winning in

more ways than one.

DG: There’s been a lot of talk in the past few years about cultural sustainability, in addition to

other kinds of sustainability, and it strikes me that’s …

BB: Yeah, it’s very much that.

DG: Is what you’re speaking of here.

BB: That’s something I think about. Even places—when I think about programs like Habitat for

Humanity, which I think is a fabulous program, but they’re always building new homes. It’s like

why can’t Habitat for Humanity rehabilitate historic homes in a historic neighborhood. Wouldn’t

that be a better mix?

DG: So, will you be showing up there?

BB: [Chuckles] I don’t know—I’m not that good at throwing a hammer. I always hit my thumb.

We’ll see how I do on my polyurethane out on the deck. [Chuckles]

DG: It certainly strikes me as being one of the edges of historic preservation that continues to

expand its audience and continues to expand its relevancy and …

BB: And I kind of wonder if there’s maybe even some intersection here for some of the work

with the tribes in preservation. You don’t think about that in terms of social justice and cultural

preservation, but it really is. Social justice often begins with voice, and making sure that we’re

giving voice to all of the people whose stories these places encompass.

DG: One of the things that struck me recently as I was thinking about the evolution of the

program is that in about four years we’ll be at the fiftieth anniversary.

BB: Is that possible? One of my first [NIXBO] meetings was at the time of the… or my first

national trust meeting was on the twenty-fifth anniversary.

DG: And it will be the anniversary of both the publication of With Heritage So Rich by the US

Conference of Mayors and the anniversary of the act, itself, that created the federal program, and

that being only four years away, I guess it’s a little tempting to think a little bit about the next

fifty years, and I’m just wondering if you might comment a little bit about whether or not the

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important work of preservation will refocus itself over the next half-century. Where is it going,

and where is the real important focus?

BB: When you think about where it’s been in the last fifty years and how much the focus really

has changed—I mean in the early years of the program it really was—when you think about the

places that were documented and preserved—it was the grand homes of rich white men and the

architectural gems in urban landscape. But you know, what’s interesting—again, I think it’s

maybe the genius of the program—while those were the first properties that were documented

and listed on the National Register, the National Register always embraced local significance,

too. When it was put together it wasn’t envisioned to be at all elitist. It was always going to be a

register that could somehow capture and share the stories of all of the people of this country.

That’s why it’s been sustained as long as it has, I think. But, we certainly have come a long way

in the diversity of the resources themselves, and also kind of how we do it. It’s gotten more

complex. Anyone that does this kind of thing as long as we’ve done it, it’s easy to kind of look

back on the simpler days when writing a nomination was a paragraph, [chuckles] because you

knew in your bones it was really significant, so you just needed a good paragraph. You didn’t

really have to make that cogent argument with footnotes and all the rest of the arguments. So

looking forward fifty years, I think I’m reminded of the talk that Charlie Nelson gave way back

when for one of the workshops, one of Dave Nystuen’s workshops on 2040, preservation in… so

he was trying to—looking ahead, 2040 doesn’t seem that long away, any more. It really seemed

a long way when Dave and Charlie gave the talk. It was probably almost fifty years away. But

you think about recent construction and you think—we build so differently. When you think

about things like the fifty year kind of rule of thumb, do we keep rolling with fifty years? Is that

a sustainable measure to really give some thought to what’s significant? I think the generation

before us had trouble thinking about properties like the Minneapolis Armory, because they were

too recent. Maybe it’s too hard for us to think about properties of our own generation.

DG: And will the generations that are coming of age in that half-century think about their

environment differently?

BB: That’s a good question. I think certainly there is so much focus today on the environment

and on sustainability, but you also have to remember that this movement kind of grew out of that

environmental movement, too, out of that destruction of so much of the built environment, with

the urban renewal and… interesting question.

DG: Will the virtual world make preservation more or less important?

BB: The virtual world is a really interesting place. I’ve been working on my family genealogy,

and it’s amazing to me what’s available online now. The 1940 census is now out there. All of the

church records for Sweden are on line—not always easy to read, [chuckles] but they’re there.

And, things like Wikipedia and Placeography now at MHS, on the society’s website, where

people are able to make their own entries. I think in some ways that certainly helps keep it

accessible, which is a good thing. There’s always a tension in preservation—that tension

between accessibility and scholarship, and it’s an important tension. And I think the other thing

is time keeps marching on and the things that seem to matter, it seems that they will still matter.

Materials are so different. Look at what buildings are built of today. Are we going to reach a

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point where we don’t need to keep doing surveys? Will everything be surveyed? There was a

notion that that would happen someday. But as properties come of age, we have to keep looking

at them again.

DG: Survey techniques evolve.

BB: Yeah, they do. It’s a program of the modern era, there’s no doubt about that, but it’s a

program of the modern era that looks back. I think we need to do a better job of learning from

history. Maybe that’s something that… I don’t know what colleges and universities are

experiencing when it comes to what’s happening in the history field, for instance, if there are as

many majors as there used to be and what… I know when I’m active in my alumni association I

get correspondence from Carleton every week or two from seniors that are trying to network and

I’m intrigued by the majors today. They’re not the majors of our generation. They’re

differently… they’re hybrids of environmental studies and cultural… just very different

sounding kinds of disciplines, so I don’t know what’s kind of happening in the discipline as

much, in the academic arena, and that will certainly have some play. It’d be interesting, actually,

to talk to the park service about this. This would be a good thing for the [NIXBO] to think

about. They’ve been spending a lot of time talking about historic landscapes and trying to

survive. We talked a little bit about the challenges with the federal appropriation last week. We

haven’t talked much about that this week, but it’s… in some ways the presence of the legacy

funds has reduced some of the panic about funding in the SHPO office, but the federal

appropriation is still very much… I think it’s never secure. How many years ago was it that we

went down to ninety percent time because of the lack of federal funding for nine months. So,

[NIXBO] kind of necessity always stays focused on keeping the state programs alive—I mean,

they’re an association of state offices, so that’s the appropriate role for them to play, but so much

of their energy goes into lobbying congress to keep the Historic Preservation Fund robust and to

make sure that leadership in historic preservation at the national level is appropriately placed.

The preservation program here in Minnesota is very much a part of the national preservation

scene, so we have to think about that in context.

DG: I think one of the things we talked about last week was how interdisciplinary historic

preservation is as a field, and how varied the backgrounds are that end up working in that area,

either as a volunteer or as a professional, and I think as we look forward I think that complexity

continues and even gets more interesting in some ways.

BB: Yeah, I think you’re right. They’ll probably be doing survey on bicycles. Better for your

health.

DG: Do you have any other aspects of either your specific work at the society …

BB: I’m just trying to think …

DG: Or about any of the disappointments or triumphs of the office?

BB: I’m winding down. [Chuckles]

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DG: Maybe a shining example of something that occurred over the years.

BB: You know, I think, when I reflect back on my many years at the society and working in this

field, my positions, except for those years on the survey team, were more office-bound than

some colleagues—I certainly got out a lot, as well, but not on a daily basis. The thing that I

always… it would always strike me when I would, say, get on the road to go out to, whether it

was a conference or to meet with people, it always kind of brought this sense of—this is why we

do what we do. It takes getting out in the field, and I think one of the challenges when the

program is growing as much as this program has grown, particularly with the focus on the

grants—I mean, just processing this volume of work and keeping the balls in the air and all the

rest, and then during times when funding has really been constrained, there’s a tendency to kind

of stay home. It’s so important to be out in the state. I know when we were doing the last round

of public meetings to get input into the planning process to revise the statewide preservation plan

this last time we did it, we heard that loud and clear again. Every time I go out and conduct

public meetings I hear this, that they want to see more of us. It was actually interesting, because

we had one meeting and there were some people there from the Waseca County Historical

Society and they remembered when I was doing the Waseca County survey and how much they

liked that, that they kind of had their own person that they could kind of go to. So I think that for

all the value of and facility that new technology provides—communication and how instant

everything can be today—there’s no substitute for face-to-face, whether it’s just meeting with

people to hammer out priorities for a new plan, or whether it’s meeting with people to walk

through their GAR hall and figure out what to do about the foundation, there’s no substitute. And

you always have to keep that in mind. We are the Minnesota Historical Society, and I think

there’s a really significant responsibility to serve the whole state. One of the things that I think

the grants office and certainly as the capital grants program gained momentum, and I know when

I would be called over to the legislature to testify—and especially, this was true after the tornado

in Saint Peter and the success we had with that recovery effort, and the grants that we

administered down there—what I would observe is that the conversations at the legislature took a

turn. They were a lot more meaningful than they had been before that. And the legislators really

cared about their communities, and when you would cite the property that happened to be in one

of their districts, it resonated with them. And if you’d actually been there, it really resonated. So,

I don’t know what that is an illustration of, but… it’s more of just an observation of kind of the

evolution of the program.

DG: And it says to me, quite clearly, that the program has always been about the importance of

place.

BB: It is.

DG: And the importance of association with place through a historical lens.

BB: That’s what got me into this field in the first place.

DG: And along with that are the people that care about the places and care for the places. So, I

think that was just a clear description of what makes the program tick.

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BB: These are real places. And if these places are lost, you’re never going to bring them back.

And we are right now in this state experiencing huge shifts—this came out loud and clear in the

statewide plan, just the aging of the population, the shifts, the increased diversity—I think all this

speaks loudly for the future of preservation, too. How does preservation help inform a new

Minnesota? I kind of go back to—I remember when we received the first flood appropriation

from the park service in, I think it was 1993, and we were doing some assessments out in

southwestern Minnesota, and did some focus groups, and I remember a comment that came back

on one of the assessments. Somebody in Pipestone put it so succinctly, that the historic buildings

in their town reminded them that they’d been through hard times before and that they would get

through this hard time. Now, if that doesn’t somehow capture in real layman’s term the meaning

of place, and the richness of these resources that we work so hard to try to keep standing.

[Chuckles]

DG: I think that’s a great summation of a lot of different things. The program, your work with

the program, and I want to thank you for spending this time to capture some of these perceptions.

BB: Thanks. It’s been an interesting exercise just to think back in a focused way over two

relatively short conversations, what has been more than twenty-five years.

DG: So, we’ll conclude this interview with a congratulations on that time you’ve spent with the

State Historic Preservation Office and at the Minnesota Historical Society.

BB: Thank you. It was a wonderful ride. [Chuckles]