The Donors of the General Museum's 'Archaeological' Collection

The following is not intended as a celebration of the people who donated the items listed in the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalogue of 1881 but simply their identification.

While several were associated with the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota or the University of Minnesota Department of Geology, most were not. Some were civic leaders, wealthy businesspeople, politicians, or members of socially prominent professions and included one of the first women archaeologists in America as well as the wife of the Army Corps engineer who built illegal dams on Ojibwe lands that flooded Ojibwe communities. Their uniting connection was that they were privileged members of 19^th century Euro-American society. Individuals with the time and resources to collect Indigenous materials and donate or trade them with the General Museum.

Some may have done so for their own aggrandizement, others out of a hope to conserve artifacts from cultures they believed were fading or had already disappeared. However, as was characteristic of the time, none of these donors placed the same value on Indigenous communities and cultures as they did on their own. And several, including members of the Survey and University, excavated Indigenous burials, something anathema to the cultures these donors thought they were preserving.

Their order matches their occurrence in the General Museum’s Archaeological Catalog.

Colonel Clement A. Lounsberry (1843-1926)

Orphaned at an early age, Clement A. Lounsberry enlisted as a private in the First Michigan Volunteers when the Civil War began. He was wounded and taken prisoner during the first Battle of Bull Run (July 21, 1861). Exchanged a year later, Lounsberry became an officer and eventually a Colonel. After the war, he moved to Fairmont, Minnesota and started a newspaper there. In 1873, Lounsberry moved to Bismarck, North Dakota where he founded the Bismarck Tribune, the state’s oldest surviving newspaper and later wrote a history of North Dakota. While at Bismarck, Lounsberry made his donations to the General Museum. In 1905, Lounsberry moved to Washington, D.C. to work in the General Land Office and did not return to the Midwest

Newton Horace Winchell (1839-1914)

Newton Horace Winchell was the third Minnesota State Geologist, head of the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota and, beginning in 1874, the General Museum curator. Consequently, it is not surprising he was responsible for many of the General Museum’s archaeological materials. Winchell arrived in Minnesota in 1872 and remained until his death. Although he traveled extensively, most notably as part of the scientific corps for the 1874 Black Hills Expedition that sparked the Black Hills Gold Rush and led to the Lakota wars. After Winchell’s appointment with the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota ended in 1901, he worked with the Minnesota Historical Society to finalize some of their archaeological studies and publishing The Aborigines of Minnesota in 1911. Unfortunately, Winchell did not confine his collections to discarded objects but excavated Indigenous burials, adding both burial goods and skeletal remains to the museum’s collections.

Henry W. Howling (1864-1911) & William Howling

Henry W. Howling was a well-known Minneapolis taxidermist who, together with his father, prepared many of the biological mounts for the General Museum. His father, William Howling, established the first taxidermy business in Minneapolis in 1856. Henry began working for his father at the age of twenty-one and took over the business five years later. While Henry donated a copper spear point to the General Museum, William was paid for three stone hammers. Henry was also the state taxidermist for many years. He mounted and arranged specimens for Minnesota’s exhibits at the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago (1893), New Orlean’s Cotton Centennial (1884), Omaha’s Greater America Exposition (1899), and St. Louis’ Louisiana Purchase Exposition (1904).

B. A. Mann

From 1872 to 1878, B.A. Mann was the agent of the Lanesboro Townsite Company, a joint stock company formed in New York in 1868 to build up the town of Lanesboro in Fillmore County, Minnesota. Lanesboro was incorporated as a village in the spring of 1869. In 1873, Mann also served as Lanesboro’s constable. He was a justice by 1878 and in 1881 was elected president of the Lanesboro Company. Mann and others from Lanesboro were specifically acknowledged by Winchell in the Ninth Annual Report “for relics and information concerning the pre-historic mounds lately opened near that city; and to the old Winnebago Chief Winnosheik of Trempealeau, Wisconsin, for an interesting tradition prevalent among the Winnebagoes concerning the mounds near Lanesboro.”

G. K. Day - no information

G. K. Day's sole contribution to the General Museum was a photograph of a clay image of the human face that was found in burial mounds near Lanesboro. Most likely Day was an acquaintance of B. A. Mann and one of the unnamed 'others from Lanesboro' acknowledged by Winchell in the Ninth Annual Report.

Christopher Webber Hall (1845 – 1911)

Christopher Webber Hall was the University of Minnesota’s second geology faculty. His initial appointment as an instructor in April of 1878 was made to free Newton Winchell of his own teaching duties so Winchell could devote his energies to the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota. Although Hall’s duties were primarily to teach, he also spent his summers with the survey as a geologist and naturalist. Hall rose rapidly through the University’s ranks, becoming an Assistant Professor in 1879 and a full Professor in 1880. From 1892 to 1897, Hall was the Dean of the College of Engineering, Metallurgy, and the Mechanical Arts. Beginning in 1889, he took over Winchell’s role as the General Museum’s curator and when Winchell left the University, Hall became the chair of the Department of Geology and Mineralogy from 1900 until his death in 1911.

John Kleckler

John Kleckler was one of the early settlers of Filmore County and one of the founding members of the county’s Old Folks’ Association, or Old Settlers’ Club, which was formed over the winter of 1874 to 1875 for those who had been in the county for eighteen years or more. Kleckler’s only archaeological contribution to the museum were arrowheads from Spring Valley but he also donated some fossils and mineral samples. In his fourth annual report, Winchell describes rocks from Kleckler’s quarry in Spring Valley.

Warren Upham

Warren Upham came to Minnesota in 1879 to work with Winchell on the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota. He continued with that survey until 1885 publishing a series of county reports from the central and southern parts of the state. From 1885 to 1895, Upham worked for the United States Geological Survey where he published his seminal work on Glacial Lake Agassiz in 1895. Like Winchell, in his later career, Upham worked for the Minnesota Historical Society. He was the Secretary and Librarian of the Society from 1895 to 1914 and its Archaeologist from 1914 to 1933. In 1920, the society published Upham’s definitive work on the origin of Minnesota place names, Minnesota Geographic Names: Their Origin and Historic Significance. Unfortunately, also like Winchell, Upham did not confine his archaeological collecting to discarded items but excavated Indigenous burials, collecting both skeletal remains and burial goods.

Rev. Cassius Marcellus Terry (1845 – 1881)

Cassius Marcus Terry was a Saint Paul clergyman who came to Minnesota in 1872 in the hope its climate would enable him to recover from tuberculosis. Outdoor activities provided Terry with his only relief from the disease, so he began working summers with the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota. In 1877, ill health forced Terry to resign from St. Paul’s Plymouth Church. After visiting Florida, Terry returned to Minneapolis to briefly serve its First Congregational Church, close to the University of Minnesota. In 1879, Terry left the ministry to concentrate on his geological work with the survey, spending summers in the field and winters preparing and cataloging samples in the General Museum. Terry lost his battle with tuberculosis in August of 1881, at the age of thirty-six. Like Winchell and Upham, Terry’s contributions to the General Museum included skeletal remains looted from burial mounds.

W. D. Hurlbut

W.D. Hurlbut was the second mayor of Rochester, Minnesota (from 1860-1861). Like John Kleckler, he was one of the early settlers of Filmore County and a member of the county’s Old Settlers’ Association. His only contribution to the museum was a flint arrowhead from Rochester. However, when Winchell first came to the state, he relied heavily on Hurlbut's knowledge of the local geology. In his first annual report of the Geological and Natural History Survey, Winchell praised Hurlbot’s intimate knowledge of the geology of southern Minnesota and acknowledged the most accurate part of Winchell’s first geologic map of Minnesota was its southern extent, thanks to Hurlbot’s contributions. Winchell would go on to mention Hurlbut in no less than eight annual reports of the survey for his contributed geological information and samples.

John O. Blackiston (1845 – 1905)

John O Blackiston was born in Antrim, Ohio but came to Minnesota prior to 1870. Blackiston lived in Ottawa Township in 1870 before moving to St. Peter where he was a druggist. By 1900, he had moved to California where he died in 1905. Blackiston was also an amateur archaeologist who excavated Indigenous burial mounds in the St. Peter area. His contributions to the General Museum consisted solely of skeletal remains and numerous burial goods.

David Percy Jones (1860 – 1927)

David Percy Jones was born in Minneapolis to wealthy parents. His father was not only a lawyer and judge but also the founder of both a bank and a mortgage company. Jones attended the University of Minnesota as a student which is when he contributed arrow points and a spear point to the General Museum. After graduating in 1883 Jones began working in his father’s investment firm. Jones was elected to the Minneapolis City Council in 1898 and began serving as its president in 1900. In 1902, the mayor of Minneapolis, A. A. Ames, fled the city to avoid corruption charges so that Jones became the city’s acting mayor and gained a reputation as a reformist. Although he did not stand for election in 1902, he successfully ran for mayor in 1904 before being defeated in his bid for a third term in 1906. Jones’ father, Judge Edwin Smith Jones, was one of many prominent citizens who donated funds to purchase a suite of fossil casts from Prof. Ward of New York. Besides his archaeological contributions, David Percy Jones also donated a sample of deposits from Castle Geyser in Yellowstone National Park.

Colonel Joel Barbour Clough (1823 – 1887)

Born in Massachusetts and a graduate of Wesleyan University, Joel Barbour Clough began working for southern railroads shortly after his graduation. At the outbreak of the Civil War, Clough and his family fled up the Mississippi to Minnesota where they lived in Hopkins Station by St. Louis Park. During the last years of the Civil War, Clough served as an engineer, earning the rank of Colonel before being discharged for illness. After returning to Minnesota, Clough alternated between working as a construction engineer for various railroads and serving as Minneapolis’ city engineer. In those roles, he provided Winchell with elevation data and notes on the local geology. In 1881, Clough moved west and spent the remainder of his life as a construction engineer in Montana for the Northern Pacific Railroad. It was at the start of his Montana residence that Clough gave his archaeological contributions to the General Museum along with some fossil elephant teeth. Most of Clough’s archaeological samples were simple cultural artifacts, but one was a braided lock of hair from a Montana man identified as Dirt-in-the Face.

Mr. Fisher - no information, but Fisher's only contribution to the General Museum was a small arrow-point of quartzose, oolitic, or concretionary chert that he found on the University campus. The University of Minnesota's Calendar for that year lists no students named Fisher, so he may have been a visitor or staff member.

Rev. G. C. Campbell

In 1881, the Rev. G. C. Campbell was a Presbyterian minister in what is now Gabon, on the east coast of Central Africa. The Ogooué River, then called ‘Ogove’ by Europeans, is the largest river of that region. Before leaving for missionary work in Africa in August of 1880, Campbell lived in Brainerd, Minnesota. He and his fiancé, Laura Kries of Monticello, married shortly before their departure. Their first station was on Africa’s northeast coast, south of the Canary Islands before they moved to Gabon. The couple stayed in Africa until 1887. Campbell’s connection with the General Museum might have been through Rev. Cassius Marcellus Terry, a Congregationalist/Presbyterian minister who worked at the museum from 1879 to 1881 but there was also a G. C. Campbell in the University’s class of 1877, who worked as an assistant in the library at the same time Clarence L. Herrick, another General Museum donor, was a museum assistant.

George Betz Dresbach, Jr. (1857 – 1910)

George Betz Dresbach Jr.’s father came to Minnesota in 1857 and founded the town of Dresbach. His father was a successful dry goods merchant who was twice elected to the state legislature. From 1879 to 1881, George B. Dresbach, Jr. was the editor of the Winona Democrat. He then used his family’s wealth to start the North-Western Brick Company in 1881. In 1889, after his father’s death, Dresbach Jr. moved to Santa Clara, California where he became an osteopath doctor. Soon after the death of his first wife, he remarried in 1906 but his second marriage was an abusive one according to his wife and mother-in-law. In July of 1910, Dr. Dresbach began beating his wife. When her mother, 65-year-old Marciana Wood interceded, Dresbach struck Wood and chased her into a bedroom. Wood retrieved a revolver and shot Dresbach twice, killing him. Both his wife and mother-in-law later told police they believed Dresbach was demented. Dresbach’s contributions to the museum were burial goods looted from a burial mound.

John H. Moss (1858 – after 1930)

John H. Moss was the business partner of George Betz Dresbach Jr. in their 1881 founding of the North-Western Brick Company in Dresbach, Minnesota. Moss and his family had recently moved to Dresbach from Sun Prairie, Wisconsin but the families had known one another previously as John was Dresbach’s brother-in-law, having married Minnesota (Minnie) M. Dresbach years earlier in Wisconsin. Another sister, Jessie B. Dresbach, lived with the Moss family for over two decades until John’s death. John and Minnie also had a daughter, Dorothy who was born in California in October 1895, which suggests they may have been visiting Dresbach Jr. at that time. Mosse’s contributions to the General Museum included skeletal remains and burial goods looted from the same burial mound near Dresbach that Dresbach Jr. looted.

H. Ellington (no information)

H. Ellington’s contributions to the General Museum consisted of skeletal remains and burial goods he looted from the largest (nine feet in height) burial mound in a group of sixteen burial mounds in the N.E. ¼ of Sec. 31, Greenwood Township, Hennepin County at the junction of the outlet from Lake Sarah and the Crow River.

Rev. Louis (Lars) Jorgenson Hauge

The Rev. Louis Jorgenson Hauge was a Baptist missionary born on the island of Funen in Denmark. He emigrated in 1858, hoping to become an Indian missionary. Settling near Racine, Wisconsin, he served briefly as a chaplain during the Civil War. In 1863, Hauge led Danish settlers to Freeborn County, Minnesota, founding Minnesota’s largest Danish settlement. However, after a clash with his church members, Hauge spent the next half century as a free-lance missionary on the Sisseton Reservation in South Dakota. Hauge’s contributions to the General Museum consisted of a withed stone ax of dark diorite he found near Albert Lea, angular fragments of chert found in Minnesota and a Cheyenne stone hammer. However, on June 3, 1884, Hauge gave the Minnesota Academy of Sciences an ‘exceedingly beautiful’ piece of petrified wood he found while visiting Sitting Bull’s band. The piece came from a ten-foot-long silicified tree trunk Hauge found atop a ridge next to a pile of stones he believed to be an altar or landmark. If the former, Hauge showed no reluctance in plundering what may have been a Lakota sacred site.

Mrs. Major Charles J. Allen

Mrs. Major Charles J. Allen was the wife of the Army Corps of Engineers’ 4^th District Engineer from 1878 through 1889. Major Allen was a Civil War veteran who served in campaigns along the Gulf Coast. After the war, Allen continued with the Corps, working on projects along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. The eleven years Allen spent in charge of the Corps St. Paul District coincided with the height of the Minnesota lumber boom. Although Allen worked on many Upper Midwest projects, among Indigenous communities he is infamous for building timber dams on Ojibwe land at Lake Winnibigoshish, Leech Lake, Pokegama Lake, and Cross Lake. While those dams provided stable water flow for the Minneapolis mills and downstream navigation, they flooded Ojibwe townsites, causing irreparable harm to Ojibwe communities. The first dams were built illegally on Ojibwe land without permission and Ojibwe communities were never fairly recompensed for their losses.

Clarence Luther Herrick (1858 – 1904)

Clarence Luther Herrick was born in Minneapolis and attended the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1880. Beginning in 1876, while still a student, Herrick worked as an assistant at the General Museum and with the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota. He received his master’s from the university in 1885 and his Ph.D. in 1898 but he also held several professorships at other universities during this time. As an outgrowth of his survey work, Herrick published Mammals of Minnesota in 1892. After developing tuberculosis towards the end of 1893, Herrick moved his family to Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1897, Herrick became the second president of the University of New Mexico but had to resign because of declining health in 1901. He managed the Socorro Gold Mining Company’s Cat Mountain mine from 1902 to 1903 before his death in 1904 at the age of forty-six.

Daniel A. Bartke (1832 – ????)

Daniel A. Bartke was born in Prussia in 1832, the son of a Prussian veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. Bartke emigrated to the United States in 1856, and moved to Wabasha County, Minnesota in 1859 where he worked as a clerk. From 1862 to 1865, Bartke served in the Civil War. In 1866, Bartke moved to Glenwood, Minnesota, then a new community. Bartke constructed a large building that served as a drugstore, boarding house, and community meeting hall. At various times, Bartke was the city’s register of deeds, assessor, and justice of the peace. After suffering severe financial losses due to the Panic of 1873, Bartke moved to a farm west of Glenwood, where he found over 20 Indigenous burial mounds. Those mounds were described by Winchell in his thirteenth annual report of 1884. However, Bartke’s only contributions to the General Museum were discarded pieces of flint and obsidian from around Lake Minnewaska.

Frances Eliza Babbitt (1824 – 1891)

Frances ‘Franc’ Eliza Babbitt was a schoolteacher in Minnesota who became one of the first women archaeologists in the United States. She was born in New York and moved to Coldwater, Michigan with family in 1873. Five years later Babbit relocated to Little Falls, Minnesota. Besides teaching, she was an amateur archaeologist who also spent time with the local Ojibwe community. In 1879, Babbitt found thousands of quartz pieces on the east bank of the Mississippi River she believed were artifacts from a pre-glacial period. After Babbit’s death, these fragments were determined to be of natural origin, but during her lifetime they sparked a controversy within archaeological circles with Winchell and Upham firmly on her side. Babbit found other tools and artifacts from the Little Falls area and was one of the first women archaeologists to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science, becoming a fellow of the society in 1887. Besides her archaeological contributions to the General Museum, Babbitt was one of the survey’s more important contributors of botanical information.

Mrs. Charles H. Crosby (1829 – 1903)

Mrs. Charles H. Crosby was Winchell’s sister-in-law, Avis Harriet Imus. Avis was seven years older than Winchell’s wife, Charlotte Sophia Imus. She was born in Shaftsbury, Vermont but moved with her parents to Michigan sometime before 1847. In 1857, Avis married Charles Crosby of Michigan and the couple subsequently moved to Battle Creek, Michigan where they spent the remainder of their lives. Newton and Charlotte Winchell named their third child, born in 1871, after Avis. The younger Avis married U. S. (Ulysses Sherman) Grant, who was Minnesota’s Assistant State Geologist from 1893 to 1899 under Winchell’s supervision. Avis Crosby’s contributions to the General Museum were two arrowpoints and a flint implement from Battle Creek, Michigan.

Oscar Ernest Garrison (1825 – 1886)

Oscar Ernest Garrison was a deaf New York land surveyor and civil engineer who came to Minnesota in 1850. In 1855, he platted the town of Wayzata on Lake Minnetonka and his mother, Hannah, who died that year of cholera was the city’s first Euro-American burial. During the Dakota War of 1862 Garrison served with the Northern Rangers, a Saint Cloud militia that fought at Fort Abercrombie, North Dakota. Two decades later, he purchased a homestead claim in Midland, Minnesota on the northwest shore of Mille Lacs. The town would later be renamed Garrison in his honor, albeit rather indirectly. In 1884, Oscar’s wife, Mary Jane Van Alstyne J. Garrison, became the region’s first postmistress, so her station became known as the Garrison Post Office and the Garrison name was later expanded to include the town. Garrison made many contributions to the survey which Winchell acknowledged in five of the survey’s annual reports. Many were botanical observations, including a 42-page contribution to the tenth annual survey report (1880) on two trips Garrison made to the Mississippi headwaters region for the U.S. Department of Forestry’s tenth census, but Garrison also contributed rock and water samples.

In the fourteenth annual report (1885) Winchell wrote that:

“Mr. Garrison lives upon an old battle-field of the ancient mound-builders. Just back of his house are three mounds which would indicate that hostile tribes had a fight there at one time, and that the dead were interred on the spot. Running southwest from the mounds is an almost obliterated ridge averaging three feet in height. This ridge. he thinks, was at one time an old fortification of the mound-builders.

The largest of these three mounds is forty feet in diameter and from ten to fifteen feet high. This was opened a year ago and numerous skeletons found sitting upright, and so old that the thin pieces of bone crumbled away as soon as touched. In the same mound were found stone implements and weapons, and some pottery”.

Most likely, some of the archaeological samples given to the General Museum from Garrison were looted from these mounds.

Dr. Arthur Maynard Eastman (1855 – 1923)

Dr. Arthur Maynard Eastman was a homeopathic doctor who was born in Minneapolis but attended college in Chicago and practiced in Pennsylvania and New York before returning to Minnesota in 1881. His father was John Whittemore Eastman who built the first large flour mill at St. Anthony Falls. From 1880 to 1881, Eastman performed autopsies at Homeopathic Hospital, Ward's Island, New York, which might have been the source of his macabre donation of a specimen of tattooing taken from the arm of a cadaver. Eastman married Hattie Lord Welles of Minneapolis in 1884 and the couple lived at 186 Summit Avenue in Saint Paul. The Eastman family lived there until 1914 when they moved to Minneapolis. Eastman was a member of the member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and experimented with color photography.

Powers Mercantile Company

Powers Mercantile Company was established by two brothers on Third Street in Saint Paul, Minnesota prior to 1871. Originally named Powers Brothers, the store eventually became a retail department store known as Powers Dry Goods and eventually as Powers Department Store. Powers expanded to eventually rival Donaldson's and Dayton's as Minnesota’s third largest department store chain, but the Donaldson Company purchased the chain in 1985 and the Powers name was abandoned. The items purchased from Powers for the General Museum came from the scandal-ridden World's Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition held in New Orleans in 1884. Winchell previously attended the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia to buy samples for the General Museum but was largely thwarted by the Smithsonian and other well-funded institutions. The Cotton Centennial provided another opportunity, especially with Powers being a Saint Paul firm. The Powers’ artifacts primarily came from Indiana, but were also from Tennessee, Kentucky, and Alabama, and unfortunately included items looted from burial mounds in Charleston, Missouri.

Horace Vaughn Winchell (1865 – 1923)

Horace Vaughn Winchell was Winchell’s firstborn child and accompanied his father on some survey expeditions from the age of fourteen on. At sixteen, he worked under Upham in the Red River valley and during the summers of 1886 and 1887 he led survey crews in northern Minnesota. In 1887, Horace transferred to the University of Michigan and lived with his uncle’s family, marrying his cousin, Ida Belle Winchell. The couple moved to Minneapolis and worked with the geological survey from 1889 to 1891. Horace moved to Montana in 1900 but returned in 1907 to care for his widowed aunt, Julia Winchell. After Julia’s death in 1920, Horace and Ida moved to Los Angeles which remained their base until Horace’s death at the age of fifty-seven. Horace’s contributions to the General Museum included a bone whistle taken from a mound northwest of Mandan, Dakota in 1882 and personal trinkets of John Otter Tail, a Chippewa Indian of Vermilion Lake. Otter Tail is the only Indigenous person acknowledged in the General Museum records apart from braid of hair taken from a man only identified as Dirt-in-the-Face.

James Nolan

James Nolan was one of the first settlers in McCauleyville, a small Red River community on Minnesota’s western border across from Fort Abercrombie. Nolan arrived in 1865 and opened a hotel in the new town. In 1870, Governor Horace Austin appointed Nolan one of Wilkin county’s three county commissioners. From 1877 until 1879, Nolan also served as the County Coroner. Along with another General Museum donor, Colonel Clement A. Lounsberry, Nolan was a member of the Old Settlers' association of the Red River Valley, attending meetings up through 1897 and serving as the association’s vice-president in 1892, as president in 1893, and vice-president again from 1895 to 1897. Nolan’s only contribution to the General Museum was a copper spearhead found on a caved-in bank of the Red River. However, in his sixth annual report (1877) Winchell describes a section taken from Nolan's highly alkaline water well, as well as selenite crystals found by Nolan around Fort Abercrombie.

H.W. Williamson

H.W. Williamson was a collector and dealer in Indigenous artifacts and antiquities although among the many items that came from him in the General Museum was a glass ornament or lamp prism from a church destroyed by the 1889 Johnstown Flood. Living in New Galilee, Beaver County, Pennsylvania, Williamson also provided objects to the Smithsonian. The Smithsonian’s 1891 accession list includes twenty-nine items from Williamson, including a few non-Indigenous items of historical interest. The Smithsonian accession list for 1889 also lists a small collection of stone implements from Pennsylvania and Michigan. All the General Museum items from Williamson were by exchange, but unfortunately the registrar did not record what was given to Williamson in exchange.

Peter Johnson

On September 20, 1891, the Ann Arbor Courier reported that Peter Johnson, of Dassel, Minnesota, claims to have rediscovered the lost art of tempering copper. Johnson contributed two copper knives, one soft, the other hard, as a demonstration of his technique. He also donated a bell of pure copper. None of these objects were of historic nature. This may have been the same Peter Johnson who in 1886 built the Swedish Tile Stove Works in Dassel, which produced Swedish stoves known as Kakslungs. They were exhibited at the Minneapolis Industrial Expositions of 1886 and 1887. If this was the case, Peter Johnson died in 1913, at the age of seventy-five.