Grassfires: An Old Duluth Tradition

If my memory is to be trusted, this bookmark was given out to Duluth public school students circa 1980. That’s how the one shown here would have landed in my possession. Maybe someone from the fire department was a guest speaker at Laura MacArthur Elementary and passed them out.

The first thing that jumped out at me, looking at the bookmark 45 years later, is the reference to grassfires as an “old Duluth tradition,” which just seems like an odd way of putting it.

But then another strange thing hit me. The illustrations are showing what Duluth Fire Department headgear supposedly looked like in the past, including the years 1830 and 1740, before Duluth had a white population or a speck of city government. Duluth didn’t have a fire department until 1870.