Above, the view of Moorhead's downtown looking down Front Street, now Center Avenue, in 1915 and inset, sometime in the 1960s. The buildings were later demolished as part of the city's urban renewal project. Clay County Historical Society archives.
Booze, booms shaped Moorhead
With dry state next door, city became watering hole
By Christopher Sprung
The Forum
Just as the residents who inhabit them do, cities experience watershed events that make
them what they are and set the course for what they'll become.
They are molded by quirks of man and nature, by foresight and myopia, by things within
control and things beyond it.
The events that shaped Moorhead over the past century are a smattering of all of those. It
is a history shaped by booze, war, economic crises, building booms, decline and renewal.
Weaned on whiskey
As dawn broke over the 20th century, Moorhead woke with bloodshot eyes and a hangover. The
railroad may have given birth to the city, but it was nursed through infancy on the
bottle.
Moorhead's boozy years took root when it became known that North Dakota would be
"dry" when admitted to the union in 1889. No alcohol would be made or sold in
the 39th state, explains Terry Shoptaugh, archivist at Moorhead State University.
The exodus was both predictable and overwhelming. Fargo saloon owners promptly packed up
their beer kegs, whiskey casks and tin cups and moved every last drop to Moorhead.
"Moorhead became a Mecca for the thirsty from dry North Dakota," wrote Edith
Moll in her 1955 history of the city.
As the liquor trade flourished, so did the city's reputation as a den of iniquity.
"It had all the things associated with saloons, especially women and violence,"
says Shoptaugh.
A haven for grifters, gamblers, no-accounts and the occasional gun fighter, Moorhead
earned the dubious titles of "Wickedest City in the World," "Sin
City," and "Beerhead."
By 1910, when a federal officer named "Pussyfoot" Johnson tried to shut down the
liquor industry by claiming the city lay within Indian territory (where liquor sales were
prohibited), Moorhead had 4,841 residents and 40 saloons, down from 44 in 1900.
Booze interests were tied closely to corruption in City Hall as well. (Some saloons
received free electricity from the city.)
While a growing body of residents and civic leaders wanted Moorhead cleaned up, they were
reluctant to do it because booze was the city's principal industry, says Shoptaugh.
"Moorhead's great problem was whether to be pure or prosperous," Solomon G.
Comstock, one of the city's most influential citizens told a reporter in a 1930 newspaper
interview.
Since virtue never filled a belly or paid a bill, liquor prevailed until 1915, when all of
Clay County voted itself dry.
The drinking halls closed on June 15 of that year. The night before the taps went dry, the
city went on its last legal bender, according to an account in the Fargo Courier-News:
"Moorhead interred its saloons last night and 8,000 people attended the obsequies.
And it was a mighty live corpse."
Fireworks colored the sky, bells clanged, a display that would not be repeated until 1933,
when national prohibition ended and booze was again legal in the city.
Respectable growth
Residents enjoy a parade that passed
through downtown Moorhead. Clay County Historical Society archives
A streetcar line that began running in 1905 spurred a boom of new physical growth as the
edges of the city opened to new housing development.
By Christopher Sprung
The Forum
April 15, 1902, brought both a twist of ill fate and good fortune to George "Rat House" Miller.
On that morning, Rat House learned what happens when you combine certain aspects of physics and law: A collapsed bridge can support you for a long time.
It was about 5 a.m. when Rat House, Charles Anderson and Louis Larson set out to move a threshing rig across the old south (Main Avenue) bridge and deliver it from a Fargo implement dealership to the Ole Larson farm south of Moorhead.
The three managed to move the rig - consisting of a separator, water tank, steam traction engine and team of horses - across the main span of the bridge and were approaching the Moorhead side when an ominous creaking came from the timber buttresses below.
A sign on the collapsed bridge warned: "$10.00 fine for driving over this bridge faster than a walk." Amazingly, the three men moving the threshing rig survived the mishap.Clay County Historical Society archives
According to an account in the Moorhead Daily News, the bridge "gave way on the south side first, and as the engine went down the team was drawn down after it, the poor beasts going over backwards to their instant death."
Anderson jumped to the next span and escaped injury. Rat House and Larson jumped from the engine as the massive machine plummeted to the riverbank below.
Drawn by the thunderous crash, rescuers ran to the scene from a nearby mill but could see little through the shroud of steam that still poured from the engine.
Larson was knocked unconscious in the fall but was otherwise uninjured, recounts Mark Peihl, archivist with the Clay County Historical Society.
Rescuers were amazed to find Rat House under the thresher in one piece. He had the good fortune of landing in a slight depression in the ground and the rise on either side was just enough to spare him from being crushed, Peihl says. He suffered only a broken leg and unspecified head injuries.
It took three days to clear the wreckage and drag the 14,000- pound steam engine up the river bank, Peihl says.
It took the city of Moorhead another eight days and $484 to repair the bridge approach.
But bad luck turned to good fortune for Rat House Miller, who went on to sue the city in federal court, seeking $10,000 in damages. The court awarded him $8,700 in 1903.
"That was a huge settlement in those days," says Peihl. "Back then people only earned maybe six hundred bucks a year."
The south bridge was finally torn down in 1936 and replaced with the present Main Avenue bridge. -
Moorhead saloons drew all kinds
By Christopher Sprung
The Forum
The saloons that made up the heart and hell-bound soul of Moorhead
in the early part of the century ranged from the grand to the grotesque.
There were drinking palaces like the Rathskeller on the Rhine, which boasted two enormous
chandeliers, an elegantly tiled floor and marble wainscoting. Others bore gentrified names
like The House of Lords, or Higgins & Aske, which sported a bar 150 feet long.
