Walking the streets of downtown Brainerd can be like taking a walk down memory lane.
The Brainerd Then and Now project consists of 40 signs featuring images of historic downtown Brainerd. In 2017, the signs were hung up and tied to downtown street poles with 3-foot zip ties.
“The idea was to put the sign showing the view exactly what the photographer was looking at back in 1890 or whatever through his lens,” said Carl Faust, a local history enthusiast.
“I had been dabbling with the ‘Then and Now’ idea for some time and found a website called something like ‘What Was There.’ It enabled you to insert your vintage photo, superimposing it into a modern Google map,” Faust said.
ADVERTISEMENT
RELATED:
Chief Hole-in-the-Day the Younger's assassination lands Hollywood screenwriter
The signs are located in the downtown core — between Fourth and Eighth streets, and Front and Laurel streets — close to where the original photo on the 1-by-1-foot picture was taken.
“Of course, being there’s streetlights and poles and everything and markers all over the town, most of them wound up on city poles. A lot of them were taken from the middle of the street, so we couldn’t do that,” Faust said of the signs’ close proximity to where the historic photos were taken.
The project was a collaboration between the Legacy Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, Crow Wing County Historical Society, city of Brainerd, Brainerd History Group, the Brainerd Public Library and the Kitchigami Regional Library.
“She spearheaded and found Legacy funding for this project,” Faust said of Bradley. “The Brainerd History Group provided site location suggestions. We decided it would be fun to post the old photo, the ‘then’ part, and the viewer would provide the ‘now’ view.”
ADVERTISEMENT
RELATED:
Early Brainerd: A frontier town in the wilderness
Given the relatively small size of the signs, each sign includes a QR code that can be scanned with a smartphone for more information from the Crow Wing County Historical Society website. Another local historian Ann M. Nelson provided the historical information.
“She has written, I’m guessing, 10,000 pages on Brainerd history … so we asked her, on all 40 of these locations, if she could give kind of a quick synopsis of what was there before, who built the building and all that kind of stuff,” Faust said.
For example, a sign at Sixth Street near Laurel Street has an image of the immediate area from the 1940s if the person was looking northeast on South Sixth Street, and includes Nelson’s following description:
“The first building on the right is the Thrifty Cut-Rate Drugstore, next the Brainerd Daily Dispatch Building, next the Land O’Lakes Cafe, the First National Bank, the Brainerd Theater and the water tower on Washington and South 6th Streets.”
ADVERTISEMENT
RELATED:
City to take the lead on anniversary celebration
The 40 signs were hung in 2017 to help kick off the fourth annual Brainerd History Week. The Crow Wing County Historical Society provided the photos.
“It took two days and about five hours each to put them up. Miraculously, no appreciable fading has occurred, nor loss of the print or image. Not bad for an $8 placard! The only ongoing costs would be the 3-foot-long zip ties. Most were donated by Fastenal of Baxter,” Faust said.
A duplicate set of placards were made to use as replacements for the ones that were hung up in 2017 in case some were stolen, damaged or lost. The duplicates are housed in the library.
“Each spring and fall, I check them all and replace any broken zip ties, and reorient some that have spun on the pole and no longer mimic the view as seen by the photographer,” Faust said.
A similar project was planned and budgeted for non-downtown locations such as parks and mines, but the coronavirus pandemic has put it on hold, according to Faust.
RELATED:
A bridge to Brainerd’s past: Kicking off the city’s sesquicentennial
“The 40 placards are done but not printed, and a more elaborate version parallels the locations to be made into a small booklet to be checkable at the library,” Faust said. “They’re all ready to go on PDFs. And if I had the funding right now, we’d email them right out to the printer.”
ADVERTISEMENT
For more information about the Brainerd Then and Now project and the existing street signs, visit https://bit.ly/2RvX1E9 .
FRANK LEE may be reached at 218-855-5863 or at frank.lee@brainerddispatch.com . Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/DispatchFL .
