(light music) - [Narrator] On this episode of Postcards - [Amanda] The Kensington Runestone is very much Minnesota's mystery.

It is very controversial.

It's probably the most controversial runestone in the world - [Narrator] Built in 1878, this home on 9th Avenue in Granite Falls, Minnesota, would be the center of family life for Andrew Volstead.

- The best part of all of it is that living and working in our home somewhat reflects what we do.

(bright theme music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's arts calendar, an arts and cultural heritage-funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central, Minnesota.

on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music, plus your favorite hits, 96.7 kram, online 967kram.com.

(light music) - The Kensington Runestone is very much Minnesota's mystery.

It is very controversial.

It's probably the most controversial runestone in the world.

People disagree about the inscription, about the weathering, about the language.

So it's gone through phases of being real and a fraud.

People get very impassioned about the history of the runestone.

Either way, the runestone's an important artifact for our culture here in west central Minnesota.

I think just because of the impact that it's had on our area and our strong Scandinavian-American heritage.

(car whizzes by) So the Runestone Museum is a museum here in Alexandria, Minnesota, and we have the world famous Kensington Runestone.

And that's how we got our namesake as a museum.

And that's what started this museum.

- [Voice Over Speakers] Claire's ability in narration makes her diary a significant contribution.

- So the museum first started in 1958 with the Kensington Runestone as its first artifact, but it's really a regional history and heritage museum.

By the 1970s, they added on nine historic buildings, and we do have a replica Snorre boat, which is a merchant ship.

It's three quarter size that originally was built by the Smithsonian Institute and was part of a traveling exhibit.

And we also have a newer Faering boat, which is a replica of a famous Faering boat in Oslo, Norway in the Ship Museum.

So we do have a great Native American exhibit, a great Minnesota wildlife exhibit and a home studying exhibit.

In addition to our middle age and Nordic exhibit.

(light piano music) Olof Ohman discovered the runestone in 1898 near his homestead near Kensington, Minnesota.

While he was clearing land, he found it in the roots of an Aspen or Poplar tree.

He didn't know right away what it was.

And then they discovered that there was writing on it.

And it turned out to be Runic writing on it.

Hence that's why it's called a runestone.

A runestone is literally just a stone with runic writing on it.

So the Kensington Runestone basically talks about a expedition that came here to this area in the 1300s and that they fought with Native Americans and died.

So the Kensington Runestone is a tribute to those men and their expedition, which a lot of runestones are.

- It was a message board.

That's all it was.

It was carved to tell people at a later time coming through that area, this is what happened with our group.

My name's Janey Westin.

I am a stone letter carver, a stone sculptor and a calligrapher.

Well, I came up today to demonstrate how carving is done in stone or runes.

It's the same technique of tap, tap, tap, tap.

This is the type of chisel that I use, a flat, straight-edged chisel.

And this shape of chisel is what has been used for thousands and thousands of years for carving letters.

It's basic, no need to change.

Tried and true.

This shape of a hammer is same design as you would have found in 1362.

I like to use a mallet and the weight is a little bit different.

It hits differently.

Okay, when I'm gonna carve something, I will first draw it out on the stone.

Let's say I'm gonna do just a simple letter I, nothing fancy, very basic.

(light music) (gentle tapping) I'm gonna use the corner of my chisel to get a grip into the stone here.

(tapping) And my goal is to make a v-cut.

(tapping) Making a v-cut valley.

Back in 2001, my father, who is an adjunct professor affiliated with the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Minnesota and me being a letter carver, we were invited by the runestone board to examine the actual Kensington Runestone.

After four and a half hours with good light and a microscope, we had to conclude it had to be authentic.

Okay, once, once I've got (tapping) a little bit of a track down the middle (tapping) then I can start to go in and shape out the sides of my cut.

(tapping) What convinced me that it had to be authentic?

Well, what we could see for the 1362 exposed area was about as much weathering as we would have expected for something five, 600 years old.

That told us it had to be authentic.

You can't fake that.

Okay, so there you go.

There's a nice letter I.

Now there's a reason why this v-cut became the standard millennia ago.

This is the most efficient way to carve a letter out of a piece of stone.

You are removing the least amount of stone to have a clearly visible letter.

So if you've done a good job carving your letter, you're gonna have shadow on one side light hitting the other side and you'll have this down the middle.

Indiana limestone, which this is, is like cutting butter.

It is so nice and cooperative.

Graywacke, a whole nother deal.

It is really, really dense, very hard.

This is graywacke and so that's what the Kensington Runestone is made out of.

The fact that graywacke was chosen by the carver for leaving a memorial stone tells you they wanted something that was going to be permanent.

I mean, it lasts many, many, many hundreds of years, and unfortunately it fell over and it got lost.

But then found again.

- [Amanda] Fun note, this was found in Kensington too.

- The more I am able to look at, compare, examine as I learn more Old Norse, I've taken Swedish classes too.

That helps, modern day Swedish.

The more I learn, the more convinced I am that there's no way this is a hoax.

Nobody could have faked what is on that stone.

- [Producer] So what do you think?

(laughing) - I can't, yeah I was like, I can't really comment.

Like I can just comment cause I represent the museum.

So I mean here at the Runestone Museum, we definitely try to stay objective.

We try to present information and let visitors decide for themselves If the runestone is authentic or not authentic.

And we try to be transparent with this research and information.

We're working right now on getting a newer 3D model of the runestone online.

So people can look at it from the comfort of their own homes.

So we encourage research.

We encourage curiosity and we love that people get excited about history when they come and visit us here at the Runestone Museum.

(powerful music) (light piano music) - [Narrator] Built in 1878, this home on 9th Avenue in Granite Falls, Minnesota would be the center of family life for Andrew Volstead, an influential member in the progressive era.

And perhaps one of Minnesota's most prominent politicians to leave a legacy on the national stage.

(light piano music) The son of Norwegian immigrants, Andrew Volstead was born on a farm in Olmstead County Minnesota in 1859.

After attending school at St. Olaf's in Northfield, He decided on a career in law.

First, studying at the Decorah Institute in Iowa, then at a local law firm.

In 1883, he was admitted to the Iowa bar.

After briefly practicing law in Wisconsin, Volstead return to Minnesota, moving to Granite Falls in 1886.

He quickly became an active member of the community, serving as a Private Attorney, Yellow Medicine County Attorney and Mayor of Granite Falls.

While serving as county attorney, he would meet county clerk, Nellie Gilworth.

They married in 1894 and would purchase this home the same year.

A year later, their daughter Laura was born and the three of them would share many fond moments here.

(light piano music) In 1902, Volstead successfully ran and was elected to Congress as a Republican in Minnesota's 7th congressional district.

The next chapter for the Volsteads was in Washington, DC.

Volstead's time in Congress came at the peak of the progressive era in the United States.

Issues involving the prohibition of alcohol, women's suffrage and antitrust legislation would dominate this period of American history.

During his final four years in office, Volstead became Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in 1919.

As Chairman, he would produce two pieces of legislation that would create his legacy in American government.

First was the Volstead Act.

The law created to enforce the newly passed 18th amendment, banning the production and sale of alcohol in the United States.

Ultimately prohibition would fail.

And Volstead's law, along with the 18th amendment, would be nullified by passage of the 21st amendmenT 14 years later.

The Volstead Act was gone, but not forgotten by many Americans at the time.

Volstead's second legislative achievement came in partnership with Senator Arthur Capper of Kansas.

Together, they introduced the Capper-Volstead Act to Congress and was adopted into law on February 18th, 1922.

The Capper-Volstead Act allowed communities of farmers to join together into cooperatives to sell, market, and transport their goods.

The act also gave agricultural based cooperatives protection from federal antitrust laws.

Many well known cooperatives from Land O'Lakes to Ocean Spray are in part successful thanks to the opportunities and protections this legislation continues to provide today.

(light music) In 1922, Volstead would lose reelection from an 11th term to Congress and return to Minnesota.

He accepted a job in the prohibition office in St. Paul and worked there until the repeal of prohibition in 1933.

Finally, he would return to Granite Falls and continue practicing law until his death in 1947.

As for the original home of the Volsteads, it would be added to the National Registry of Historic Places in 1974.

And several years later, donated to the city of Granite Falls.

Today, it serves as the Andrew J. Volstead House Museum and continues to share the great American prohibition and cooperative story.

(light piano music) (upbeat music) - I always had an interest in art.

That was something that I felt like I was good at from a young age.

And I just decided that that's what I wanted to do.

I wanted an art degree.

I didn't wanna be a teacher.

I didn't wanna be anything else, I just wanted to learn.

And I really wanted to try lots of different mediums and see what fit for me.

(upbeat music) I moved to Fergus Falls when I was 12.

My dad was a Bush pilot he was a business owner.

When I was 12, my dad became a type one diabetic and he lost his license to fly alone.

And it kind of changed his life.

It was actually very pivotal to me for that to happen because I'll never forget he did something for about a year.

And then he sat us down one day and just said, you know I'm just not really happy.

I'm going to do this and this, you are fine and I'll take care of you and we'll all be fine but I need to find what it is that I'm meant to do.

And so we can all be happy.

And I actually think that that was a huge influence in my life because I feel the same way.

(upbeat music) I am currently on the road, selling a line of jewelry that I started.

This line of jewelry actually came about because as we were traveling for Jay and starting to do his work, we were traveling and I kept picking up stones.

And I pick up a lot of things that resonate to me.

And I was picking up a lot of natural materials and I was collecting these things and I liked the feel of them.

I liked what they made me think of.

And I started to put them together in ways that made me feel good.

And that was in some jewelry.

(upbeat music) Some of my different things.

So I might just start playing around with.

I need some parts, and I might say, I really like the look of something so what can I put together?

I like this piece with this piece.

And I might find another little piece that I really liked hanging off to the side.

(bright music) - I'm a contemporary wood sculptor.

And I come by it honestly, because my family, actually I'm the sixth generation person involved in the wood industry in the state of Minnesota.

I'm told that my family had a millwork company in Red Wing, Minnesota prior to statehood.

And they're probably rolling over in their graves seeing what I'm doing now, because it's far removed from the lumber and millwork industry.

(bright music) I feel as though I'm taking woodwork as an art form in a different direction.

The first half of my career, when I was designing and building the furniture was an awful lot about making the material, wood, doing whatever I willed it to do.

It was mastering the tools, mastering the techniques, and I can make wood do anything and I have.

This body of work, the contemporary wood sculpture, it's not a figurative thing.

It's more based on feeling.

What makes one feel good.

I like to have soothing forms, forms found in nature.

And the difference between this work and what I did initially is now, that it's a bit of a meeting in the middle.

(upbeat music) The vessel carved out of this.

And the first thing I have to determine is how far this hollow defect goes into the log.

And I can see that it's going in this direction, like so.

And so what I'm going to do is just cut a chunk off to like, right where this and see if that eliminates the defect.

And otherwise I'm actually gonna have to lay the vessel out to avoid that.

(upbeat music) I use predominantly grinders, different heads on electric grinders.

It's freehand carving.

I'm using the grinders because I'm after a very spontaneous fluid form.

(upbeat music) It's kinda rinse and repeat.

And then it's, then I work down into more structured carbide and finer grinding heads.

I use local woods now because I have to.

Because when I'm carving, I'm carving when the wood is still wet.

I'm also carving out of a single block.

I don't glue up smaller pieces to get my carving blocks.

And so I have to have big trees.

And that's why I don't harvest a tree for my work.

I use nothing but fallen trees.

This year's been kind of tough.

Hey, good news, bad news, there haven't been a lot of storms, not a lot of trees blowing down.

So I use logs from fallen trees near my studio.

Everything came from within 20 miles of here.

So here, this piece is piece of sugar maple, came from East Battle Lake and this is what it looks like after I have done the carving and after it's dry.

(upbeat music) I haven't built a piece of furniture probably for 15 years with the exception of our current dining room table.

I was on the river in Dayton Hollow, just a couple miles south of here, with my dog, he was out swimming.

I was standing on the shoreline.

And I felt as though I was standing on something other than river bottom and I was moving the silt aside with my foot and realized I was standing on a, I thought it was a piece of plywood.

I ended up putting a chain on it and pulling it out of the river with my truck.

And I mean, it just, it was one of those things that just kept coming and coming and coming.

It ended up being about a 26 foot long plank of Douglas Fir.

And I took it back to my old studio, put it behind some cabinets up against the wall and forgot about it.

Until we moved the studio back here, now our studio's at the home.

A couple years later for Cindy's birthday, I said, I'm gonna make you your table out of that board.

And so I matched it together, made the table.

I find the most interesting part of the story is in the early 1900s and the teens somewhere, a dam north of town failed and it took out several dams below it.

And so what we think it was, pretty sure, is it was a road plank from a bridge, just one mile down the road from here that got washed out at the same time.

Pretty certain that's what it was, because when I was filling these fissures with epoxy, those fissures were oozing creosote.

So it kind of came full circle.

It took a a hundred years since the bridge was washed out and I've made the table.

And so now I'm guessing this is forever where it will be, because when we leave here, we're not gonna have a place for it anyway.

So it's gonna stay with the house.

(light music) - I think for the most part, the best part of all of it is that most of the time we're on the same page.

We, as far as the type of work we do, and when I say that it's not the same, it's not the same work, but I think we look for a natural simplicity in some ways, soothing forms.

And also, living and working in our home somewhat reflects what we do.

(light music) - And the biggest thrill about being able to make what I do work and have this be a viable career path.

This is all about me making things that I really love and then finding someone else who loves them enough to part with their money and collect it.

And that is, it's really humbling.

And it's incredibly satisfying to get that validation.

(light music) (bright theme music) - [Narrator] Postcards is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the Citizens of Minnesota.

Additional support provided by Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen on behalf of Shalom Hill Farms, a retreat and conference center in a prairie setting near Windham, Minnesota.

On the web at shalomhillfarm.org.

Alexandria, Minnesota, a year round destination with hundreds of lakes, trails and attractions for memorable vacations and events.

More information at explorealex.com.

The Lake Region Arts Council's arts calendar, an arts and cultural heritage-funded digital calendar showcasing upcoming art events and opportunities for artists in west central, Minnesota.

on the web at lrac4calendar.org.

Playing today's new music, plus your favorite hits, 96.7 kram, online 967kram.com.

(light music)