Herman H. Dahl

HERMAN H. DAHL

Herman H Dahl was a country schoolteacher-turned-storekeeper who used a camera to record family and community life in and around Ulen at the turn of the century.

Dahl was born in Houston County (finding no record of the family in Houston County - that appears to have been his wife's family - more likely Herman was born in Filmore County, MN - next county west of Houston County) in 1869. He moved with his parents, into the Borup area (Norman County, MN) and taught country school in the Ulen area after attending Moorhead Normal School. Dahl married one of Ole Ulen's granddaughters, Thurine Burtness. They raised a family of four girls and two boys on Ulen's east side. A fifth daughter died in infancy.

As the family grew, Dahl became interested in photography -- so much so that he bought a 5 x 7 inch stereographic camera, a Pony Premo No.4. This was hardly an amateur's camera, and the pictures Dahl took were hardly snapshots. He had a natural photographer's eye, and an innate sense of composition.

Between about 1900 and 1911, Dahl used that Premo (and his artistic ability) to make pictures of the daily life in Ulen. The negatives were glass plates which Dahl developed and printed in the bathroom of the Dahl house (now the Donald Forsythe residence).

Dahl died in 1949 at the age of 80. For a number of years after his death, those old glass negatives lay forgotten in the basement of the Dahl house. But when Mrs. Dahl died in 1962 and the house was sold, a number of the old negatives were saved. While many of the negatives had deteriorated beyond use, some were salvaged and prints made.

Those prints became the basis of a retrospective photo exhibition in the Red River Art gallery in Moorhead, Minn. in 1976. Some of them have become classic examples of life in small town America at the tum of the century.