Photograph postcard depicting a shipment of butter produced by Farmers Cooperative Creamery in Milaca, c.1915. Minnesota farmers expected to produce goods for a market, and came to use cooperatives like this one to control the prices they received for their goods. Photograph by O. L. Palmquist.

Rimmed miner's helmet worn by Adam Shapic circa 1910–1930s. Shapic worked in iron mines near Virginia, Minnesota, until he was injured in a mining accident that left him paralyzed.

Machinery at work stripping overburden for ore on the Mesabi Iron Range c.1905.

One-sheet poster advertising the Washburn Mills in Minneapolis. It highlights the importance of mechanization, local wheat and water power, and global ambition to the firm. Included in the 1889 carnival edition of the St. Paul Dispatch.

Engraving of a bonanza farm printed in the November 1, 1879 edition of the Independent Farmer and Fireside Companion (page 174). The image celebrates the commercial possibilities of large-scale, mechanized, and systematized wheat farming in the Red River Valley.

Cluster of Minneapolis sawmills, c.1865.

Woman's white ermine tippet and muff set made c.1840 from pelts collected by traders working for the American Fur Company. Worn by Sarah Alexandrine Sibley, sister of American Fur Company agent Henry Sibley, during an 1840 visit to Washington, DC.

Four trade beads created in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. These European-made objects took on new meaning and significance in the context of the fur trade.

Thirty-nine barrel-drawn, unevenly faceted glass beads created in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.