Some Updates from the Grand Forks Census Project

As readers of this blog may remember, I’ve been doing some casual and sporadic work with the Grand Forks census (here and here). This is partly an effort to develop some of my research skills as a historian and partly to trying to understand the history of my community in a way more grounded in primary sources (and less in my penchant for vague generalizations). With the 1950 census becoming available, I’ve been able to do some work that I hope to contribute to some ongoing efforts by the Historic Preservation Commission to study the impact of 1960s Urban Renewal on Grand Forks. 

As a result, I’ve been focused on comparing the 1920 and 1950 census with a particular focus on one neighborhood destroyed by urban renewal. For those of you who know Grand Forks, this neighborhood stretched from Belmont west along the the railroad and from the railroad south to Fourth Avenue South. The western end of end of this neighborhood is the triangle made by where the railroad tracks would have intersected with the route of Fourth Avenue South. Today, that the Demers Avenue overpass, itself a urban renewal project, obscures the western end of the former neighborhood.

This neighborhood is visible here in the 1928 Sanborn Map index and covered by maps 6, 19, 20, and 21.

We feel confident declaring these blocks a neighborhood based on a 1934 “Chicago School” master’s thesis from the University of Chicago by Ewald Carl Pietsch titled “The Activity Pattern and Major Activities of Grand Forks, North Dakota”. He describes this as neighborhood defined as much by its proximity to both downtown and the railroad as its generally depressed economic character. Pietsch described the district in the 1930 as “very old and poor buildings, principally occupied by Jews and by narrow, short streets, The area Is unattractive for residential purposes because of its proximity to the noisy coach yard at the north and the Railway Yards with their smoke to the west. If the city grows, this area may well become a business section in the future” (Pietsch 1934, 236-238).

In 1920, this neighborhood had 1354 residents, and by 1950 this had increased to 1666. In 1930 there were 262 addresses and this increased in 1950 to 352 and as a result, the number of individuals per address decreased from 5.2 to 4.7 residents per address. In census terminology there were 312 heads of household in 1920 and 476 in 1950. The ration of residents to heads of household shifts from 4.3 to 3.5 between 1920 and 1950. In short, “census families” seem to be getting smaller. While I’m just starting to mess with the data, the increase in residences might reflect the subdivision of homes into smaller apartments by 1950. Fortunately, we have the 1920(ish) Sanborn maps with 1951 pastedown making it possible to count the number of buildings in the area. I just haven’t done this yet, but integrating the 1930 and 1950 census with the GIS is the next big step in this project.

For now, however, we can at least form some hypotheses on the basis of the census data alone. I became curious about whether this poorer neighborhood was primarily occupied by immigrants. This was, in part, based on the assumption that many of the Jewish families who came to live in Grand Forks were immigrant families from Eastern Europe (especially Russia) at the turn of the 20th century. In the 1920, 23% of Grand Forks’s 14,335 residents were foreign born and 45% of them were first generation Americans with at least one parent born abroad. By 1950, only 6% of the city were willing to state for the census that they had been born abroad and only an addition 6% of the city would claim to be first generation. Of course, the 1950 census appears to have been less systematic in its efforts to collect information on the place of birth of one’s parents. Post-war patriotism (and xenophobia) might have also discouraged residents from identifying as foreign born or of foreign born parents as well. Allowing for different census priorities and reporting habits, the drop nevertheless seems significant.

For the neighborhood we’ve set out to study, in 1920, 29% of the residents were foreign born with 9.7% born in Russia, 6.9 in Norway, and 5.3 in Canada. The widower Francis J. Carter claimed to be born “At Sea” in 1864 to an English father and a Spanish mother. He worked in Grand Forks as a carpenter. 

By 1930, that number had dropped to 21% with 8.2% born in Norway, 4.5% Russia, and 3.24% in Canada. Interestingly between 1920 and 1930 several of the families who had identified as Russian were now identifying as “Lithuanian” perhaps in response to the growing awareness of the Russian Revolution. This includes the Rabbi Papermaster and his family. Francis J. Carter appears to have either passed away or moved on by 1930 census by 5 more individuals claim to have been born “At Sea” (most of whom claimed to be born somewhere else in the 1920 Census suggesting that this is either a recording or transcription error or some kind of artful dodge). In any event, Grand Forks’s foreign born residents dropped to 16% of the population in 1930 with Norway, Canada, Russia, Sweden and Germany being the only places of origin recording more than 1% of the total population. I’ve not run the first generation numbers for 1930, but I will do this at some point.

In 1950, the total population of the city was 90% US born (according to census reporting; with Norway and Canada being the other countries with more than 1% recorded) and our neighborhood registered 8.5% foreign born with an additional 7.1% claiming to be first generation.

What does this tell us? 

Well, it seems to indicate that the “inner” south neighborhood, as Pietsch called it, had a notable foreign presence in 1920 and 1930, but by 1950, the presence of both foreign born and first generation residents had more than halved. Looking at the age of immigrants in 1920 and 1950 tells part of the story. In 1920 the average age of an American born resident of our neighborhood was 21; the average age of a Russian born resident was 37, Norwegian born was 50 and even Canadian was 42. By 1950, Russian and Norwegian born residents were in their mid-60s and even Canadians were 52, while average age of Americans was 29%. This tells the well-known story of waves of immigrants coming to the region at the turn of the century producing first-generation American children.  

It is interesting that for our neighborhood foreign born women and American men produced nearly 19.3% of the first generation children in 1920. This might reflect the presence of slightly more women in both our neighborhood and Grand Forks in general where they accounted for 51% and 52% respectively. On the other hand, it is notable that in Grand Forks, first generation children tend to have had only foreign born fathers 21% of the time and only foreign born mothers 13% of the time. In other words, in our neighborhood foreign-born women with American partners produced more first-generation children than foreign born men and American women. In Grand Forks more broadly, this was reversed. One wonders whether this has to do with Pietsch’s observation that our neighborhood was heavily Jewish. I would need to do more research — with particular attention to the age of the children — to sort this out, but it is intriguing that as late 1950, the more first generation individuals claimed foreign born mothers and American fathers that the opposite in our neighborhood even as the trend in Grand Forks shifted significantly in the other direction (with 29% of first generation Grand Forklers claiming foreign born fathers and American mothers as opposed to 17% the other way).

There are, of course, myriad other kinds of analysis that once can conduct on this data. A quick query told me, for example, that in our neighborhood the percentage of married individuals increased between 1920 and 1950 by 4% and the number of widows/widowers nearly doubled from 3.6% to 6.5% between those years. This likely reflects an aging population in the neighborhood. Young people who could find a better place to live either in town or elsewhere were leaving, as were many of the immigrants, and those left behind were older and perhaps less affluent. Of course, these kinds of assumptions are just hypothesis right now and some of them probably can’t be tested based on the census data alone.

We know, of course, that local historian Ken Dawes has written a private history of the neighborhood which we’ve seen, but not read. We also know that urban renewal records should be able to tell us a good bit about the neighborhood in the 1950s when it was destroyed. City records are famously spotty because many were lost during the 1997 flood, but maps of the city, for example, can provide insights into physical character of the neighborhood over time. It goes without saying that newspapers can fill in details that connect names to particular events and circumstances. Right now, we’re only scratching the surface and it remains to be seen how deeply we’ll dig!