NEWS for North Dakotans
Agriculture Communication, North Dakota State
University
7 Morrill Hall, Fargo, ND 58105-5665
June 25, 1998
Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University
©1998 Plains Folk
It was a grand idea, and an aromatic one. Alfred Arvold wanted to plant a row of lilacs all the way from Fargo to Grand Forks. That never got done, but "Lilac Days" was a spring ritual at North Dakota Agricultural College from 1931 into the 1950s. There was a lilac queen, and a lilac prince on horseback, and a Chinese garden, and all sorts of goings-on that were highly unusual for an aggie campus.
Arvold, professor of theatre at NDAC for 46 years, was an unusual fellow. Early in this century he got caught up in the ideas of the Country Life Movement, a reform movement aimed at improving rural life to make it more attractive. As Arvold saw it, young folks left the farms and the small towns of our region because they were bored. They needed outlets for creative expression. Arvold figured community theatre was the thing to make small-town life worth living.
Later he was identified with the Regionalist Movement, which carried the idea that any part of the country had its own rich store of history, culture and traditions, and should make the most of it, rather than just following the lead of the big cities.
That was a good thought then, and it remains so today. In Arvold's time he was swimming against the current. You might try to make life more exciting and worthwhile in the country, but the economics and demographics were all against it. Rural flight to the city marked the generations from the 1920s to the 1980s. In the 1990s, though, maybe we should pay more attention to what people like Alfred Arvold said. (And let me say thanks here to a student of mine named Megan Vogt, who researched Arvold's ideas and taught me about them.)
Arvold is best known as the founder of the Little Country Theatre at NDAC. He took over the top floor of the administration building and remodeled it in rustic fashion to make what was called the Lincoln Log Cabin a cozy little theatre. His vision was that students at NDAC would learn how to do theatre and then go home and do it in their own communities. He also made sure than in taking their required speech courses, the students learned how to run a meeting according to Robert's Rules, so that they could go home and be community leaders.
Come summer, Arvold did not lay about after the students went home. He followed them home, organizing workshops in town after town, teaching people how to put on plays and presiding over "play days." Each summer, too, the Prairie Stage players from NDAC took college theatre into the countryside.
What really got Arvold excited, though, were pageants. He loved to see a community look back on its own history, compose a theatrical narrative of it, and then organize itself for production on a grand scale. He said that a pageant is "stronger as a social force than it is as an art." In 1934 he helped the towns of Towner and Cando devise pageants celebrating their 50th anniversary of founding. "Fifty Years in Bottineau County" was another of his projects. Back in Fargo he got the El Zagel Shrine to produce pageants in a natural amphitheatre where now a golf course sprawls. Finally he composed a template for the community pageant called "The Land of the Dacotahs" that was used in communities across the state.
In what seems like a contradiction in terms, Arvold bore the title of director of drama for the state extension service. He couldn't tell you how to cull your chickens or stake your tomato plants, but he wrote remarkable extension circulars on how to produce community plays, how to organize community activities, and how to build community leadership. The Lincoln Log Cabin is still there atop the administration building at NDSU, although access has been restricted by the fire marshal. I would like to think that the spirit of Alfred Arvold is not dead, but only resting, and waiting for more propitious times to carry the gospel of community development across the plains again.
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Source: Tom Isern (701) 231-8339
Editor: Barry Brissman (701) 231-7866