Executive director Maureen Kelly Jonason says new interpretive displays will be in place for the 40th anniversary celebration of the Hjemkomst ship’s voyage to Norway. (Photo/Russ Hanson.)
Nancy Edmonds Hanson
The 40th anniversary of the Hjemkomst Viking ship’s historic voyage across the Atlantic will be celebrated with a newly designed interpretive gallery – one that combines artifacts with audiovisual displays and kiosks to bring the story to virtual life.
Maureen Kelly Jonason of the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay County has been working since last summer to gather support for the refreshed exhibit, now being developed by Brown Knows Design of Duluth. The cost of the exhibit itself is $100,000; a new public address system and technology to make it accessible to visitors who are blind or deaf make up the balance of the $150,000 goal.
The campaign has raised $127,300 to date. Several large grants laid the groundwork, including $50,000 from the Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies and $25,000 from the Fargo-Moorhead Convention and Visitors Bureau’s capital project fund; another grant, this one from the Minnesota Historical Society, is also in the works.
The HCSCC board and the director have raised $52,300 in gifts from individuals and businesses in the community, among them $10,000 from Sanford Health and $5,000 each from the Offutt Family Foundation and Bell Bank. “Our Moorhead vendors have been extremely generous in supporting us,” Jonason adds. “We have received gifts from many, many individuals.”
The support reflects, she says, the ship’s role as the premiere tourist destination in the city. Some 32,000 visitors viewed the ship and toured the historical society’s other exhibits in a normal year prior to the pandemic, along with 1,500 to 2,000 school children who visit each May.
The executive director says the 2022 opening will mark the third or fourth iteration of the exhibit recounting Moorhead middle-school counselor Robert Asp’s dream of building and sailing a hand-built replica of the Gokstad ship to the original’s birthplace in Norway. He completed his ship in 1980 and boarded it in Duluth for crew training on Lake Superior. But his death later that year prevented him from taking part in the final chapter of his dream.
In June 1982, the Hjemkomst’s journey began from the port of Duluth. After traversing the Great Lakes, it sailed around the Statue of Liberty in New York and set off for the nearly seven-week Atlantic crossing. It arrived in Bergen, Noway, on July 19. The next year, it returned home aboard a freighter and was donated by the Asp family to the city of Moorhead. The iconic Hjemkomst Center was completed in 1985, with its tented roof designed to accommodate the 63-foot-tall ship’s masts and sails.
Jonason says the new exhibit gallery reflects “a Nordic sensibility,” with lots of wood and shades of blue accented with splashes of color. “We’re using more of the space in the ship gallery,” she notes, including the wall space on all four sides. Five freestanding kiosks around the ship will be movable to accommodate special events.
The new design, she says, will permit the HCSCC staff to change out some artifacts to tell more facets of the ship’s story – the equipment they used to cook, for example, and the crew’s worldwide ham radio system. Virtual reality equipment will allow visitors the experience of standing on the deck, viewing the ship from the crew’s perspective. Several interactive exhibits are planning to catch children’s interest, including one on semaphores, the colored flags mariners use to spell out messages from the masts of their ships. Large maps will trace the ship’s voyage, the ancient Vikings’ travels and all the spots around the world that have contributed immigrants to Clay County.
Along with the Hjemkomst displays, the refreshed gallery will include explanatory displays about the significance and story full-scale replica of the Hopperstad Stave Church that stands in Viking Park just north of the center. That building was the dream of another local craftsman, Guy Paulson. He built it on-site between 1996 and 2001 and donated it to the city. It was dedicated in 1998; he spent another three years completing the ornate carvings inside and out.
Visitors viewing the church from the north side of the ship gallery will learn its story from reading rails that line the windows. According to Jonason, that interpretive material is also being updates to correct some inaccuracies in the original 2007 text.
The completed gallery will unveiled to the public on July 23, 2022, with an open house and celebration of the 40th anniversary. Some members of the original 13-member crew, which included three of Asp’s sons and his daughter, are expected to attend the event.
Jonason is looking forward to results from the final exhibit in the new gallery – a response station that invites viewers to share their own dreams. “The Hjemkomst and the Hopperstad Church both began as the dreams of visionary men,” she says. “This is a way for each of us to reflect on our own. After all, ‘Dare to Dream’ is very big here, and the dreams live on.”
