Puposky, tiny logging town hands on, celebrates 100 years

By Molly Miron Pioneer Editor

With the city’s population of about 18 men, women and children, Puposky’s Centennial Celebration committee includes half the population.

Once an important logging depot and passenger stop on the Minnesota, Red Lake and Manitoba Railroad, Puposky now consists of a few houses, Our Redeemer’s Lutheran Church, Durand Town Hall and the post office (ZIP Code 56667).

The spirit of celebration brings town, township and other area residents together annually for a fall celebration. This year, the event is a historic anniversary, the 100th year since Puposky’s founding.

The celebration today begins with a fishing derby on Mud Lake from 6:30 a.m. to noon. Elaine Hovde at 243-2320 is the contact person for fishing derby tickets.

From 10:30-11:30 a.m. there will be outdoor worship with special music at Our Redeemer’s.

Dinner at 12:30 p.m. will feature a pig roast, buns, potato salad, beans, cole slaw, hot dogs, beverages and bars. There is no charge for the dinner, but a free-will offering will be taken. There will also be door prizes and sales of souvenir T-shirts, cookbooks, buttons and history books.

The program at 2 p.m. at the Durand Town Hall will include wagon ride tours of the town site, courtesy of teamster Earl Speckman, and historical displays. Melvin Juve will serve as tour guide. Wilbur McKnight, an elder former resident of Puposky, will share his memories of growing up in the pioneer town.

Early days

The first homesteaders in the Puposky area were Carl Durand and his family on the northeast corner of Mud Lake, also called Puposky Lake. According to Beltrami County Historical Society archives, Durand applied to the state for a post office, which he named Delphine for his daughter.

Boosters saw the way the railroad was being laid out and organized a township named for Durand. Townships usually cover 36 sections, but Durand Township has 18.

Hovde said Durand Township separated from Turtle Lake Township when Puposky was founded on Sept. 26, 1905.

“We’re really only half a township,” she said.

Delphine Post Office had closed in 1901 and Puposky Post Office was organized in 1905.

But the impetus for the town’s development was logging and the railroad to haul the logs to mills.

“The town blossomed,” said Darlene Pearson, a Centennial Celebration committee member and Puposky resident since 1949.

She said the name comes from the Ojibwe, meaning the end of the moving land. Moving land refers to the Red Lake Bog, which runs to the northern end of Mud Lake.

“The train was a logging train,” Pearson said. “The first train went from Red Lake to Nebish. They couldn’t float the logs down because Nebish was landlocked.”

After much of the timber was cut and the northern part of Beltrami County opened for homesteading, Pearson said settlers would arrive on the train, rent a horse and wagon and scout for the land they wanted to take up for farming.

As the town prospered, a school was built in 1906 and two stores and two hotels served residents and travelers.

“At one time they had taxi service and barbershops,” said Pearson.

“I grew up here all my life,” said Hovde. “I remember going in the Puposky store, in that side door, going to the store after church to get some candy.”

Railroad decline

The train quit running in 1932 and Puposky’s businesses gradually dwindled.

“The first church was the Catholic church (St. Patrick’s),” said Hovde. “It burned in ’48. I found the foundations.”

However, Our Redeemer’s organized in 1928, built the current white frame church in 1936 and joined the North Star Cluster of 10 area Evangelical Lutheran Church in America congregations in 1998. Hovde said about 35 worshippers gather most Sundays.

Hovde said she also found the remains of the old blacksmith shop and salvaged some horseshoes and traced the foundations of Warner’s Hotel, a triangle-shaped building opposite the railroad depot. Hovde said there was a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Tucker’s Field and a potato storage house. Many people also worked at the Lake Julia Sanitarium, which opened in 1916 to care for tuberculosis patients. From 1954 to 1968 it operated as Beltrami County’s Lake Julia Nursing Home.

“And just about everybody had a small farm,” said Pearson. “There were still a lot of loggers, even though the big logging companies had left. There still are.”

The school burned in 1952 and wasn’t rebuilt. Don Hovde, who was about 6 years old at the time, said the children went to school for a year in the Lutheran church and then were bused to Central Elementary School in Bemidji.

Although much of the former bustling town has now disappeared into the woods, and the west end of Main Street has a strip of grass growing down the middle, residents and former Puposky folks celebrate the 100-year history of the little town on Mud Lake.