Associate Professor Rob Mann and student Courtney Kujala take notes in Sauk Centre.
But when St. Cloud State Associate Professor Rob Mann and his students look around they see barns, stores, officers’ quarters and troop lodgings. They see the outlines of a military post built in the aftermath of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War.
Mann and students Mike Penrod and Courtney Kujala spent two weeks this July doing preliminary searches for evidence of the fort near a stone marker at the corner of Birch St. and Seventh Avenue in Sauk Centre.
The year-long investigation of the post is being funded by a $10,000 Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grant from the Minnesota Historical Society.
The investigation is important in an archeological sense because military sites built during the U.S.-Dakota War period are not well known, Mann said.
“There’s probably only one other military fort from the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 along the size and scale of this one that has been investigated,” he said. “These were built for the 1862 crisis. That makes them unique archeologically.”
Cultural Resources Management student Michael Penrod and community member Vince Botz search for artifacts with metal detectors near the site of the post’s barn.
Other well-known forts from the time period such as Fort Ripley, Fort Ridgley and Fort Snelling have been well documented, but were built before the U.S.-Dakota War.
Built in 1862, the Sauk Centre fort was used by the U.S. Army until late 1865 when the Army moved to forts further west.
“At that point we don’t quite know what happened to the stockade,” Mann said. “It could have stood for as much as 20 years. By sometime in the 1880s — it’s gone.”
Mann decided to seek the post after a graduate student found a map of the site in the archives a few years ago.
“For several years I thought about whether or not we could find this fort,” Mann said. “This year we decided to see if we actually could.”
With the assistance of community members and local historians, the trio began their search in the Sauk Centre Area Historical Society History Museum & Research Center where they found historical sources related to the post.
These sources suggested that the historical marker was located right where it claimed to be — at the northwest corner of a barn located within the military post. Using that information, Mann was able to get a copy of the post layout superimposed upon a Google maps view of the current neighborhood to inform the researchers where to look for evidence of the fort’s features.
During their initial two-week investigation this July, the researchers used high powered metal detectors to find evidence of the former officers’ quarters and historical artifacts outside the barn site.
Artifacts collected have pointed to the military nature of the site. Among the artifacts they’ve recovered are a metal buckle for an officer’s gun sling.
Artifacts recovered at the site and a copy of an 1862 layout sketch of the post.
Additionally they’ve found pieces of white ceramic dishes typical to the fort’s time period and animal bones that can point to the diet of officers and enlisted men and evidence of the structures including nails and glass shard. In all they’ve uncovered hundreds of artifacts that they’ve now taken back to St. Cloud State University to analyze before returning to the fort for more intensive investigations in the fall.
Anthropology student Courtney Kujala, who has been hired as a student worker thanks to the grant funding, uncovered a bezel for a pocket watch locket. The bezel would have allowed the watch to hold a picture of a loved one, which points to the daily life of the soldiers stationed at the fort, Mann said.
Kujala compared the search for the fort — both in the archives and in the field — as a puzzle.
Going through the historical center archives, Kujala recalled looking through a folder with documents and newspaper articles on the fort.
“I couldn’t believe what I was reading,” she said. “One after another there was something different that put us on track for where we wanted to be. It was a lot of fun.”
A watch bezel found at the site.
Cultural Resources Management graduate student Mike Penrod is exploring in his thesis why the military invested so much time and effort into this place and this line of forts.
“We think part of their interest in fortifying a place like Sauk Centre was to protect trade to Canada, caravans, oxcarts that were hauling the buffalo robes down from Canada to the plains and the goods back up,” Mann said. “The military saw that as something they wanted to invest men and money and supplies into protecting.”
The military post was built around the store and barn of a Sauk Centre man named Pendergast. It was situated overlooking the river, the primary mode of transportation at the time, and a road from St. Cloud to Fort Abercrombie in what is now North Dakota.
The road and river were part of a merchant road, known as the Red River Oxcart Trail connecting Winnepeg to St. Paul. Buffalo and other furs would come down and supplies would be transported back up.
The Sauk Centre fort would have supported those transactions, but the fort was built as part of a series of posts during the U.S.-Dakota war and was spawned by the military’s goal of protecting settlers in the area, Mann said, adding that native people have a different perspective on the military’s reasons for building and occupying the post that isn’t reflected in the military records.
The post included Pendergast’s store and barn, officers’ quarters, a dwelling house for private citizens, guard house, sutler’s room, baker house, quartermaster’s office and storeroom and compartments for 100-150 men.
They are hoping to learn in their investigations about how the soldiers lived at the time and how the post’s structures were built and whether a planned expansion of the stockade was ever completed.
Penrod will also explore the difference between traditional, very low frequency metal detectors and more sophisticated pulse induction detectors that can hit on targets that are much deeper underground than can be detected by traditional detectors.
Penrod has a lot of expertise with military history. He has a doctorate in American history and taught the subject for a number of years, but returned to school for a Cultural Resources Management degree as an interest area.
His interest in military history led him to choose the fort project for his thesis.
Metal detectors can be used as a tool by archaeologists to find items that traditional archaeology techniques may miss, Mann said.
“At this site they have really helped us to hone in on areas of the site that are related to areas that we’re interested in from the maps and also to locate artifacts quickly that are diagnostic to say ‘yes this was the fort’,” he said.
