This week in state history

Historic Minnesota events with anniversaries this coming week.

Oct. 7

1910 Forest fires destroy Baudette and Spooner, killing 29 people and burning over 220,000 acres of land. During this dry year over 900 fires had burned in twenty-nine counties, causing 42 deaths. Graceton, Pitt, Cedar Spur, and Williams also burned.

1935 Amelia Earhart speaks to the Women's City Club in St. Paul as the final part of a tour of Minnesota, including the Iron Range. Formed in 1921, the club valued social, cultural, political, and intellectual pursuits and also hosted speakers Gertrude Stein and T. S. Eliot. Two years after the speech, Earhart disappeared on a flight over the Pacific Ocean.

Oct. 8

1910 Gus Hall, chairman of the Communist Party, U.S.A., is born in Virginia, Minnesota. His given name is Arvo Kusta Halberg. Hall would join the Communist Party at age 16 and, despite his stated political views, serve in the U.S. Navy during World War II. He would run for president four times and spend over eight years in prison for his activities. At its peak in the 1930s, the Communist Party had about 100,000 members. Hall died Oct. 13, 2000.

1956 Southdale Shopping Center, the world's first fully enclosed shopping mall, opens in Edina. Austrian war refugee and architect Victor Gruen designed the mall, which he hoped would become "the town square that has been lost since the coming of the automobile. It should become the center of this civilization." Later realizing that civilization was in fact crystallizing around the mall in a commercial way rather than according to his utopian vision, Gruen would retire from architecture in 1967 and become one of the most ardent critics of commercialized mall culture until his death in 1980. Taking exception to Southdale's claim as the first indoor mall might be Morgan Park historians. The Lake View Store in this part of Duluth is also considered the first modern indoor mall built in the United States, though on a much smaller scale than Southdale. It was built in 1915, and held its grand opening on July 20, 1916. The building remains today.

Oct. 9

1933 The bones of Browns Valley Man are found in a Traverse County gravel pit that was likely a Paleo-Indian burial site between 8,000 and 12,000 years ago.

1949 A statue of Leif Erikson, called "Discoverer of America" and sculpted by John K. Daniels, pictured above, is dedicated as part of the state's territorial centennial. The result of a 10-year fundraising campaign by the Leif Erikson Monument Association, the 13-foot bronze statue is located on the capitol grounds in St. Paul. Daniels also sculpted the statue erected seven years later in Duluth in today's Leif Erikson Park.

1979 Rose Totino patents her "Crisp Crust" frozen pizza crust, an improvement on what she called the "cardboard crust" pizzas that were available at the time. The Northeast Minneapolis entrepreneur had sold Totino's Finer Foods to Pillsbury in 1975 and had become a vice president in the company. By 1992 Totino's would control 20 percent of the frozen pizza market.

Oct. 10

1918 Men working near a railroad siding northwest of Cloquet see a passenger train pass by the siding, and soon thereafter discovered a fire burning through grass and piles of wood. The fire could not be contained, and by October 12, fires had spread through northern Minnesota, destroying Cloquet and other communities in Carlton County.

This column is derived from MNopedia, an online project that has a "This Day in Minnesota History" feature on its website. Developed by the Minnesota Historical Society and its partners, it is a free, curated, and authoritative resource about state history. The information here is culled from "The Minnesota Book of Days," published by the Minnesota Historical Society Press.