This online museum is composed of exhibits created by American Studies students at Minnesota State University Moorhead.  It uses materials and artifacts from the Clay County Historical Society's Museum and Archives.  The Historical Society has thousands of items that it can not display regularly.  This online museum is intended to be an alternative display site so that more material from the Collection, and far more people, can access it.

  This web site is the creation of American Studies students at Minnesota State University Moorhead.  Our intention is to present the multicultural history of Clay County, Minnesota by using the resources of the Clay County Historical Society.  Clay County is next to Fargo, North Dakota.  Clay County is part of the Red River Valley -- an exceptionally flat river drainage that runs from southwest Minnesota up to Lake Winnipeg in the north.  Many think of the area as a culturally homogenous region, dominated by Scandanavian-Americans.  It's not as simple as that; Clay County has a complicated and interesting past in which different cultural groups have interacted.  And the present Clay County is increasingly diverse, with Hispanic-Americans (who have been here throughout the twentieth century), different European-American groups, and immigrants from Bosnia, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Nepal, India and more.

  We've selected artifacts, images and archival materials from the Clay County Historical Society collections, researched them, and present our findings here.  We chose topics that would highlight the multicultural past of our community.

  Each exhibit is the creation of the students, and reflects their independent research and web site design. 

  We've created this web site as a work-in-progress.  As a community historians, we invite others in our community to consider creating their own web sites presenting the past and the present cultural life of Clay County.  If you'd like to learn about how to begin your own local history project, please see our "History Toolkit".

This is an ongoing project.  Over the years, the Museum will grow as more exhibits are created by students and hopefully, other members of the community.  If you have ideas for future exhibits, or are interested in creating one of your own using the resources of the Clay County Historical Society collections, please do contact Mark Piehl of CCHS or Helen Sheumaker of MSUM.

  This project was funded by two generous grants. This program was made possible through a Learning That Lasts program grant from the MnSCU Center for Teaching and Learning with generous funding from the Bush Foundation. This program was made possible through a grant from the American Studies Association and its members.  The grant, the ASA Community Partnership Project Grant, provided generous support for this project.