Do-It-Yourself Building

Sayer's crew of eight voyageurs built the North West Company Fur Post in six weeks, staying just ahead of the approaching winter. They used materials at hand, including white pine for the buildings and stockade and clay to chink the logs and build the fireplaces. By the time the post was completed and firewood was stacked for the coming winter, the crew had felled enough pine trees to level the immediate landscape. In the 1930s, a young boy discovered a gunflint that had survived from the North West Company's winter there in 1804-05. Thirty years later, archaeologists from the Minnesota Historical Society excavated the area to locate where the stockade and other post structures had stood, and their maps and Sayer's journal were used to construct a reproduction of the fur post on the same spot as the original.

Minnesota · United States