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Bemidji, during the 1930s Depression era, was a mixed bag of tough economic times, resilient individuals who helped each other out, the construction and development of roads, buildings, and lakeshore, and promotion of year-round tourism. The October 1929 stock market crash and the Dust Bowl that followed in waves throughout the 1930s put much of the country into a tailspin, but Bemidji adapted and survived. The three main banks in Bemidji at that time First National Bank, Security State Bank and Northern National Bank remained open and endured. Downtown businesses like the Bemidji Woolen Mills, Gill Brothers, Bemidji Hardware and others survived. Money was tight for most people, so they adapted grew bigger gardens, foraged more, hunted, raised chickens and traded what they had for what they needed. With everything that occupied them, they still found ways to entertain themselves and to celebrate. ....
Although Bemidji was not incorporated until 1896, it had a steady pattern of growth beginning in 1870 when Oliver W. Barnes traveled by stagecoach, ox team and a canoe route to the Bemidji area with a government surveying party and spent spent the next six years mapping the northern part of the state. Barnes reported only one Native American person living at the outlet of the Mississippi for miles around the Bemidji area. The title to the Bemidji land was acquired in 1883 by Phillip Reilly of the John Martin Reilly Lumber Company of Minneapolis for its pine value. In 1888, Marion Ellsworth Carson and George Earl Carson came to Bemidji by tote team cutting a wagon trail 17 miles due east from Moose, where they had started a trading post a year before. They established the Carson Trading Post at the south end of the lake and east of the Mississippi River, becoming Bemidji s first white businessmen. They also built the first mercantile store on the Bemidji townsite called t ....