Volunteers asked to help survey Lake Bronson basin

By Anna Jauhola
Members of the public will have an opportunity this summer to be a part of history.
The Minnesota Historical Society, in conjunction with the Kittson County Historical Society and Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, will conduct an archaeological study of the Lake Bronson basin.
“They’re critical team members for this project to really take off,” said Jennifer Rankin, archaeology director for MNHS. “One of our goals of this project is while we’re inviting educational groups and community groups, we’re hoping several volunteers who are local to the Lake Bronson area can serve as future stewards for archaeological resources.”
Rankin said this survey is a pilot program to guide local people toward stewardship and partnership with the state and local historical societies. When Lake Bronson is refilled, it will naturally fluctuate, giving stewards the opportunity to keep an eye out for issues like erosion and impacts on archaeological sites.
Volunteers will work in two-hour rotations – 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and 1 to 3 p.m. – starting the week of July 7. Opportunities will be available Tuesdays, Wednesdays and some Saturdays. Volunteers will be asked to commit to eight hours or more throughout July and August.
This survey will strictly focus on the lake basin at this point, Rankin said. The lake has been drawn down since late 2024, so most areas are pretty sandy, she added, but there are places that are still wet. Officials will look at inaccessible areas before bringing volunteers in to help survey.
MNHS will be looking for 20 to 30 volunteers from the area to help survey the lake basin. There is a sign-up page online at https://mnhs.info/lakebronson, but volunteers are encouraged to also speak with Cindy Adams, director of the Kittson County History Center/Museum in Lake Bronson to sign up.
Volunteers will go through one or two hours of training with MNHS prior to going onsite to assist. Rankin said volunteers will each be paired with their own archaeologist.
“Archaeologists are bridges between history and hard sciences,” she said. “When we do this, it’s in a way we’re looking at past activities of human life, but we’re also looking at landscapes people interacted with. So we have to have backgrounds in other disciplines, especially the sciences.”
She’s excited for this to be a citizen science project for volunteers to be able to help tell a tale.
Trainings will be either at the museum or the visitor’s center at Lake Bronson State Park.
Throughout the project, members of the Minnesota Archaeological Society and students from Minnesota State, among others, will be brought in to participate.
Rankin noted that archaeologists look for items as recent as 50 years ago when they’re on any site. In this case, they’ll look for any boats, snow sleds or ice houses that sank, for example.
What they really hope to find and study are bison bones, but they are also looking to understand the work that went on in the WPA era camp where the workers lived during construction of the original dam.
Volunteers’ biggest tasks will be walking over the basin in transects to flag any artifacts, features or indication that humans interacted with the landscape. They will also make note of these findings in a notebook provided and log them via GPS on a tablet, also provided.
“We’re interested in the clear cutting of the basin before it was inundated, so we’ll be looking for stumps with clear saw marks,” Rankin said. “We’ll also be looking for any stone tools related to indigenous people. Really, any marker that indicates people interacted with the landscape.”
Rankin said anyone can volunteer, and they must have the ability to hike over uneven terrain. The basin of Lake Bronson not only has varying depths, but also logs and other obstacles that might be difficult for some people. Others with flight or drone experience will have the opportunity to help with aerial surveys as well.
“This is a unique opportunity because we don’t often get projects this large,” Rankin said. “We know we should see things as early as the end of the ice age when the glaciers were receding, and pretty recent too, like remnants of foundations.”