The Cook County Historical Society is celebrating a remarkable milestone in 2025: its 100th anniversary.
For a century, the organization has been committed to collecting, preserving, and sharing the history and culture of Cook County and its inhabitants. While volunteers, board members, and staff have come and gone over the years, the organization’s mission has remained unwavering.
The historical society maintains thousands of artifacts and oversees five historic sites in the county: the Cook County History Museum, the Johnson Heritage Post Art Gallery, St. Francis Xavier “Chippewa City” Church, Bally Blacksmith Shop, and a 1930s fish house replica featuring the Nee-Gee fishing tug.
In addition to the physical sites, the Cook County Historical Society staff and volunteers make a committed effort to engage with the residents and visitors of the community by hosting educational and informational events, such as artist talks, exhibits, and demonstrations.
“Our responsibilities are to preserve these historic places and preserve the collections,” said Margaret Hedstrom, the Cook County Historical Society board vice president. “To make sure that people in the present and the future are going to learn about the history of this area.”
Each of the historic sites is rich in history, and for some, given the year they were built, require a significant amount of resources and funding to operate and preserve. The organization has recently conducted minor site improvements, such as roof upgrades, paint, log rot repair, landscaping, etc. Hedstrom said the Bally Blacksmith Shop is the most recent historic site to undergo upgrades, enabling the historical society to expand its educational blacksmithing demonstrations.
“We like to be able to show how it was really done in the past and do that in a way that’s interesting to people who maybe never thought about something like that before,” Hedstrom said.
To complete the necessary facility and grounds improvements, the Cook County Historical Society board members and staff have worked to secure funding to support the preservation of the five historic sites and to enhance archival storage and public accessibility. In 2023, the Cook County Historical Society was awarded $700,000 in Minnesota appropriations for renovating the sites and constructing an archival storage facility.
While there is a long list of priorities moving into its centennial year, Hedstrom said the board is focused on moving forward with preservation work on the Chippewa City Church. After an architectural assessment of the property, Hedstrom said there were structural issues.
“We need to do some structural repairs,” Hedstrom said. “And we need to do some work on the siding, the painting, possibly the roof. So, it’s going to be a big project.”
Another area of focus in 2025 and years to come for the historical society will be to find additional space for the growing archive collection. Many archives are stored at the Cook County Museum and the Johnson Heritage Post, but space is limited, and the donations keep rolling in. “One of our long-term goals is to find appropriate climate-controlled storage for our collections,” Hedstrom said. The organization also aims to expand the digitization of its collections, making them available in online records to improve public accessibility.
As the historical society prepares to commemorate the centennial milestone, the organization is undergoing staffing changes. Recently, Katie Clark, the executive director, stepped away from the position after five years. During the transition, Aliya Marxen, the current gallery manager at the Johnson Heritage Post, serves as interim director.
While the organization intends to host numerous special centennial events to celebrate the 100-year milestone, Hedstrom said that the 2025 event schedule won’t be finalized until an executive director is hired. However, she remains optimistic about finding a qualified executive director to lead the historical society in 2025 and beyond.
As someone who grew up in Grand Marais and spent 26 years as an archives and museum studies professor at the University of Michigan, Hedstrom said, “The Cook County Historical Society has been around for 100 years, and that’s very unusual for a small community like this.”
She believes that the expansive interest in the historical activities, lifestyle, landscape, and culture of the region, and the historical society’s approach to sharing and displaying that information, is what “keeps people engaged in coming back to the museum and our historic sites.”
“Interpretations of the past are constantly changing, and as we learn more, we get new collections. We ask different kinds of questions,” Hedstrom said. “History is a living thing.”