St. Cloud State University has earned a $71,000 Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grant to help preserve the Birk Collection, a library, archive and collection of artifacts from Minnesota’s history.
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Birk, who died in 2017, worked as an archaeologist in Minnesota for several decades focusing on the European colonial period in Minnesota and Western Wisconsin. He was an expert on fur trade history and early European exploration. He also co-founded the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology.
The collection came to St. Cloud State University in February thanks to a donation from Birk’s life partner, Lynda Weiss, and from a collaboration with Morrison County Historical Society for stewardship of artifacts from a major site excavated by Birk.
The grant will fund preparation of physical spaces at St. Cloud State to serve as the permanent library, laboratory and archival space for the collection with the appropriate environmental controls and security necessary to protect the collection. The work will include processing and creation of a filing system for the paper archive by a professional archivist.
The collection is extremely important to Minnesota and Great Lakes archaeology and history as well as an opportunity for researchers and students at St. Cloud State and beyond, said Rob Mann, Associate Professor of Anthropology.
The Birk Collection includes research texts — archival and primary documents, artifacts from an important fur trade site Birk worked on throughout the 1980s, photographs and slides from excavations and much more. The collection includes documents covering the fur trade era, dams, logging campus, railroads and forts.
The Minnesota Historical and Cultural Heritage Grants program is a competitive process created to provide financial support for projects focused on preserving Minnesota’s history and culture. This state-funded program is made possible by the Legacy Amendment’s Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, created through a constitutional amendment by the people of Minnesota in 2008.
The Birk Collection
• A research library of over 2,000 volumes of books, journals, site reports, and manuscripts.
• A paper archive of approximately 80 linear feet of materials, including extensive and comprehensive field notes for 50 years of archaeological field work
• An extensive map collection
• Artifacts and associated records from the archaeological site of an 18th-century fur trade post listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
