In the summer of 1995, I worked a three month internship at The Warroad Pioneer, which I'm sorry to say has since ceased operation. This was the first professional newspaper that I worked for in my career, and it turned out to be a wonderful experience. I had only worked at Bemidji State University's newspaper for about a year and half before landing the internship. At The Pioneer I gained experience in sports, feature, beat and government reporting. I designed pages, took and developed photographs and was responsible for community relations. The best part is that I remain friends with the owners nearly 30 years later.
July 11, 1995
By Devlyn Brooks
The Warroad Middle School's sixth grade received more than just knowledge in Ron Tveit's Minnesota history class this year. They had an opportunity to be an active part in a piece of history.
When Tveit heard of Bill and Margaret Marvin's offer to provide $4.5 million dollars for a new court house, provided it be moved to Warroad, he said, "You always try to bring real situations into the classroom. This is history in the making."
So Tveit turned this interesting issue into a voluntary class project for sixth-graders. The students who wanted to participate each wrote to the county auditor in one of the 87 counties in Minnesota, asking if their county had ever encountered anything similar. Tveit said that some kids even wrote to two counties.
"The response from the counties was fast and furious," he said. "We had some really interesting responses."
Out of the other 86 counties in Minnesota, only nine didn't respond to the letters. According to the map, 39 counties have tried to move, or have moved, their county seat out of 77 counties that responded. (This excludes Roseau County and the nine which did not respond to the survey.)
"The response varied a lot," Tveit said. "Some counties only filled out the questionnaire that we attached to each letter, and other counties sent 9 by 11 inch manila envelopes full of information."
A secretary who works in an auditor's office in a southern county even wrote a lengthy letter telling the sixth grade that she was following the debate in Roseau County closely because she had graduated in Roseau.
According to the information that was sent, most of the counties were aware of what was happening in Roseau County.
When answers started rolling in, Tveit said they would have a mail call in the morning, and then they would mark their findings on a map of Minnesota counties that they made. Any county which had tried to move, or did move, their county seat was colored yellow.
When the school year ended, Tveit turned the letters and the map over to the Historical Society. The map now rests in the Warroad Heritage Center.
One of the more humorous responses the sixth-graders received was from a southern county, Tveit said. It seems that two towns had been having a bitter fight over the county seat. So they finally decided to take one horse from each town for a horse race, which would decide which town got the county seat.
"It was a neat project, and the kids enjoyed getting mail," Tveit said. "It just goes to show you that government works in mysterious ways when it falls into the hands of the people."
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