The 10,000-pound, 20+ feet long, World War II anti-tank gun that sits on the lawn southeast of the entrance to Bentson/Bunker Fieldhouse was acquired through the joint efforts of the North Dakota Agricultural College Veterans Club and the North Dakota Agricultural College Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) department.The gun was obtained from the federal arsenal at Rock Island, Ill. The cost of transportation and installing was about $670, and the Fargo American Legion Post helped with some of the costs. Dedication was held on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 1958.

The plaque was kept blank, anticipating that in the general election of Nov. 4, 1958, North Dakota Agricultural College would become North Dakota State University. The name change proposal was defeated. The vets decided to go with North Dakota State College (NDSC), the name students had been referring to the college since the 1920s.

The plaque reads: “A memorial to all N.D.S.C. veterans, may their contribution to college, state and nation help bring peace and brotherhood to mankind. N.D.S.C. Vet’s Club, November 11, 1958.”

Perhaps you've noticed that metal kind of pyramid thing in concrete slightly to the west of the round administration building of the College of Engineering and Architecture. "Students daily walk past a bent and never even know it. A bent? A bent what? The bent is the national insignia of Tau Beta Pi, SU's chapter of the honorary engineering society. The bent is designed after the supports often used under bridges. The bent outside the engineering buildings was sent to the SU chapter as an unfinished casting. Society member finished the model and mounted it in its present position." (Spectrum, Tuesday, November 7, 1978, p. 9)

The plaque reads: "Tau Beta Pi, North Dakota Alpha Chapter, Chartered 1950, A national engineering honor society recognizing excellence and integrity in Engineering."

The bison statue sits in front of South Engineering, across from the Library and Minard Hall. It was donated to NDSU by Jim and Sandra Roers, with contributions from Ronald G. and Kaye S. Olson and Student Government. It is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Les Pavek, Vice President of Student Affairs, and Michael William Barner. The statue once stood inside of a bank in Minnesota.

The bison statue that is positioned on the north side of the president's residence in the driveway loop was graciously donated by Ronald G. and Kaye Olson to be displayed at the president's residence.

On Tuesday morning, May 17 1904, the Bjornson 'bautasten [obelisk], which had been placed on the North Dakota Agricultural College grounds, near Old Main, was unveiled. This Obelisk is in honor of Bjornstjerne Bjornson (1832-1910), the great Norwegian writer and statesman, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1903. The buildings of NDAC were all decorated with bunting and the flags of Norway and the United States. A large crowd, estimated from three to five thousand, was on the grounds. The granite sculpture is 13 feet tall and weighs 4 tons.

The stone was carved from material brought from a quarry on Bjornstjerne Bjornson’s estate in Norway. After the stone was cut and finished at St. Cloud, Minnesota, the Sons of Norway of Abercrombie, North Dakota, presented it to NDAC. On one side of the Obelisk is a seal with Bjornstjerne Bjornson’s likeness. On the reverse side is the last verse of the Norwegian Nation Anthem, written by Bjornson. Roughly translated into English, it reads: “Yes we love this land of ours as it rises forth furrowed weather-beaten o’er the waters with its thousand homes. As our sires struggles raised it from need to victory, also we, when it’s demanded for its Peace pitch camp.”

The Obelisk still stands south of Old Main, between Putnam Hall and Burgum Hall.

The trophy is a model replica of the quartzite monuments that marked the border between North and South Dakota when Dakota Territory was split into 2 states along the Seventh Standard Parallel (45°56'07" N). The monuments were seven feet tall and ten inches square at the top, and were mined and inscribed near Sioux Falls. 720 markers were placed at half-mile intervals along the border by Charles Bates in the summers of 1891 and 1892. The monuments were inscribed with the initials "N.D." on the north side and "S.D." on the south side.

The trophy itself was proposed by Adam Jones, then-President of the NDSU Chapter of Blue Key National Honor Society, and was unveiled to the public on April 21, 2004 at a ceremony just outside Hankinson, North Dakota, a community near the North Dakota/South Dakota border.

The inscriptions include: N.D., S.D., and 190 M (the distance between Fargo, ND and Brookings, SD along Interstate 29). The trophy weighs nearly 75 pounds and is commonly carried around the field immediately after the game's conclusion by the winning team.

'Grandmother Earth's Gift of Life Garden' to be dedicated at NDSU, 05/22/2009 by Najla Amundson

A new garden honoring American Indians will be dedicated on Monday, June 1, at 1:30 p.m., at the corner of Centennial Boulevard and Administration Ave., on the NDSU campus.

“Grandmother Earth’s Gift of Life Garden” will feature native North Dakota plants. Tribal colleges from around the state will provide soil to add to the garden.

“The earth plays an integral role in Native American culture. There is great importance placed on taking care of the earth. Having NDSU provide a space for this garden shows the university’s respect toward the Native American culture,” said Jacylnn Davis-Wallette, assistant vice president for equity, diversity and global outreach.

The dedication ceremony will include a blessing from a spiritual leader and seeds will be given to those who attend.

NDSU’s Extension service and plant sciences department helped plan the garden. The multicultural student services department sponsors the garden.

This memorial, located between South Engineering and Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, debuted in the spring of 2005 as a tribute to Professor Dennis C. Colliton, one of the founders of the landscape architecture program at NDSU, who died suddenly in 2003. The rocks that make up the fountain plaza are called "buffalo-rubbed" rocks which are quartzite. "The polishing seen on some of the rocks is probably associated with glaciation, although some attribute these surfaces to rubbing by bison.”

After the tearing down of the old Mechanical Arts building in 1993, which was adjacent to the northwest of the South Engineering building, a fountain was constructed, but due to leaks and numerous maintenance problems, ideas about replacing it were generated. In 2002, Dennis Colliton spearheaded a landscape architecture competition and the "babbling brook" concept won the competition. Unfortunately, on August 17, 2003, Dennis passed away unexpectedly. Nevertheless, construction on the "babbling brook" began in May of 2004. In the spring of 2005, the "babbling brook," now renamed the Dennis C. Colliton Campus Memorial was dedicated.

Dennis Colliton was born January 24, 1951 in Niagara Falls, New York. The family moved to Minot, North Dakota and Dennis graduated from Minot High in 1969. He received his bachelor‘s in Architecture at North Dakota State University [NDSU] in 1974. He earned a master‘s of landscape architecture from Cornell University in 1976 and his initial professional registration as a landscape architect in 1980.

Colliton joined the faculty of architecture at NDSU in 1976. In 1983, Dennis, with Cecil Elliot, the Chairman of the Architecture Department, founded the landscape architecture program. In 1986 he Dennis became the Program Director of landscape architecture program, and except for 1997-1998 when he served as department chair, he served continuously in the position. He oversaw the initial accreditation process for the program in 1991. In addition to his academic responsibilities, Dennis was also owner of Dennis Colliton Landscape Architects, Fargo

Dedication ceremonies were held Oct. 8 for a campus memorial to honor NDSU alumni, students and staff who have died in service to our country. More than 150 people attended the dedication and first flag raising at the Fallen Bison Memorial, located just south of Bentson-Bunker Fieldhouse.

Retired Gen. Charles Wald, a 1971 NDSU graduate, was the featured speaker.  Wald is the former Deputy Commander of the U.S European Command. He also served as Deputy Chief of Staff for Air and Space Operations at the Pentagon.

During his comments, Wald paid tribute to Lt. Robert Schmitt and Capt. Thomas Gramith, whose names are included on the memorial. Schmitt, a 1948 NDSU graduate, was killed in ground combat during the Korean War. Gramith, a 2005 NDSU graduate, died during an Air Force night mission in Afghanistan.

The ceremony featured a color guard of Air Force and Army ROTC Cadets and a three-volley salute by American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars members. Air Force ROTC Cadet Patrick A. Bergh played taps.

The 20-feet square memorial is built of brick and granite, with a flagpole in the center dedicated to Schmitt and Gramith.

Donations for the Fallen Bison Memorial can be sent to: NDSU Development Foundation and Alumni Association, PO Box 5144, Fargo, ND  58105-5144.

Rededication of the Memorial Union

Franklin M. Bancroft served as the director of Auxiliary Dining Services for 32 year. This oak tree is dedicated to him (June 1995) for his progressive, perceptive and sensitive leadership ion serving NDSU and the food industry. Nationwide, offered by his colleagues and friends in appreciation of the fairness, honesty, understanding and dignity with which the treated all of us throughout his long professional career.

Research plots 2 and 30 were placed on the National Register of Historic Places by the United States Department of the Interior in 1992. The plot's soil has the same general properties of soil in the surrounding Red River Valley. The retreating glacier which created the Valley left in its wake, a large lake known as Lake Agassiz, since reduced to the meandering Red River which flows north to Lake Winnipeg in Canada. As result of this glacial history, the soils for the Valley are rich, finely textured sediments which were deposited as a lake bed.

Because of the desire for controlled and reliable data (as is true of any scientific experiment) there was no introduction of other soils, chemicals or fertilizers into this plot which would have impaired efforts to identify the flax pathogen. Therefore, the plot has remained "pure" as a laboratory which duplicates the regional soil environment in which flax wilt (plot 30) may occur or which wheat (plot 2) is cultivated.

Research plot 30 has been cropped continuously to flax for nearly a century. The field is cultivated each fall and then sown to flax in the spring. Evaluations of the disease of the various flax genotypes are made and recorded during the summer.

Research plot 2 is still being cropped continuously to wheat. The field is cultivated in the fall and then sown to spring and durum wheat early each spring. The plant genotypes are evaluated for root disease resistance each fall and the data recorded.

Kiesling Grove (also known as the Shade Garden) in honor of the Plant Pathology Chair who had this area planted, this area is comprised mostly of cottonwood and pine trees. An area for annuals is here as well as ferns and hostas.

Laurel D. Loftsgard was the first NDSU alumnus to serve as president of NDSU. He was born in Hoople, N.D., in 1926. He served in the armed forces after graduating high school and again during his collegiate career. Loftsgard earned his bachelor's degree in agricultural economics from NDAC in 1954, and master’s and doctoral degrees from Iowa State.

Loftsgard returned to NDAC as an assistant professor of agricultural economics in 1958 and was appointed vice president for academic affairs in 1966. He was appointed acting president in January 1968 and made permanent by the Board of Higher Education six months later. During his presidency, enrollment increased by more than 50 percent and building projects worth more than $30 million were undertaken. Loftsgard spearheaded creation of the NDSU Development Foundation and many other achievements. He received Blue Key's Doctor of Service Award in 1980.

President Loftsgard died of cancer in early October 1987 after serving as NDSU's president for 19 years. The new crop and weed sciences building was dedicated L.D. Loftsgard Hall in 1991.

"Large Crowd Witnessed Ceremonies: last Thursday noon there gathered at the gateway, an enthusiastic crowd of faculty and students and at the appointed hour, Pres. Worst picked up a shovel and turned the first sod in preparation of the construction of the new gateway. The President remarked that after twenty-one years of waiting, a permanent gateway was to be erected due to the initiative and efforts of the class of 1912 and Mark Heller in particular.

This gateway is to extend from the hedge on the south boundary of the campus to the north side of the walk making a total of 80 feet. There will be four large pillars on either side of the drive and one on either side of the walk. These four pillars will be connected by a panel work and an ornamental seat, backed by grill work will be placed between the two central pillars. The structure will be set deep into concrete and will be built of brick, sandstone and granite. There will be an ornamental urn at the top of each pillar, about which large electric lights will be placed on the campus and street sides. The iron grill work will be artistic.

The class of 1912 and Mark Heller, its hustling member, are to be congratulated upon this effort to perpetuate their memory on the campus. … Haxby and Gillespie the leading architects of the city have kindly lent their services to the Board by presenting them the plans of this gateway.” (Excepts of the article taken from the September 24, 1912 Spectrum, p.3)
For several decades, visitors passed through the gate on a roadway that ran from the corner to the front steps of Old Main. It served as the main entrance to the campus until 1950, when the road was removed and replaced with a pedestrian path and grassy mall.

The gate was damaged during the 1957 tornado that struck the north side of Fargo. In 1969, the current decorative gate, with its entryway welded shut, was installed. In October 2001, the “Main Campus Gate Re-opened. The NDSU main gate has been re-opened to pedestrian traffic for the first time in more than 30 years. During the ceremonies Oct. 5, President Joseph A. Chapman said, “In terms of both literal and figurative, NDSU is opening up to a great future. Our campus is opening the gates to progress.”

The Memorial Plaza was the brainchild of then Dean of Home Economics, Katherine K. Burgum and Richard Weltzin, Foundation Coordinator, NDSU Alumni Association.

In order to assist with fundraising for the Family Life Center*, the National Women's Committee, headed by Jean Mason Guy (Class of 1944), was organized to help in the campaign. "Some 242 alumnae personally contacted members of their classes to complete the $100,000 goal set by the National Women's Committee. Surpassing their goal, over $150,000 was given to the Family Life Center." (Dedication program, October 1, 1976)

The Plaza contains over 700 bricks, each with the name of the person or group who donated the brick. The brick contributions were $60 or more to the building fund for the Family Life Center. Bricks for the Plaza were donated by Hebron Brick; Twin City Construction Company donated services; the North Dakota Masonry Institute donated the labor to lay the bricks; and Dakota Monument Company did the engraving of the names.

*The Family Life Center was rededicated the Katherine Kilbourne Burgum Family Life Center in September 1998.

Noble’s Golden Marguerite was a Jersey Cow that was owned by Samuel F. Crabbe, a dairy farmer in the Fargo area who had imported seven purebred Jersey Cattle from the Island of Jersey (The Island of Jersey is the largest and most southerly island of the British Channel Islands.). He developed an outstanding Jersey herd and served as the President of the American Jersey Cattle Club. The culmination of his career as a Jersey breeder was the development of Noble’s Golden Marguerite. In 1921 she produced 977.69 pounds of butterfat, which at the time was the greatest production record ever achieved in North Dakota, by any breed of cow.

In 1913, the dairymen of the North Dakota, under Crabbe's leadership, secured an appropriation from the North Dakota Legislator sufficient to build the Dairy Building and the original dairy barns on the North Dakota Agricultural College campus.

When Noble’s Golden Marguerite died in 1932, the head of the Department of Dairy Husbandry, Professor J. R. Dice and the President, John H. Sheppard, friends of Sam Crabbe, proposed that she be buried in front of the Dairy Building on the North Dakota Agricultural College campus. She was buried in a grave in front of the Dairy Building on August 12, 1932. Shortly thereafter, a plaque, embedded on a boulder, commemorating her achievements was placed by her grave. The story should end here, but does not.

In 1976, Dairy Husbandry, which was a component of Animal Science, moved to Walster Hall. The Horticulture Science Department took over the Dairy Building, and had the concrete cow’s head that was mounted on the roof removed (now sitting on a pallet in archival storage), and had the plaque and concrete boulder commemorating Noble’s Golden Marguerite achievements move to the entrance of Shepperd’s Arena. In 1992 Horticulture Science moved and the building became the Engineering Technology Building. In 2009 plans for the Geosciences Department to move into the building were underway and as of 2010 it is the Geosciences Building. The plaque and concrete boulder still remain in front of Shepperd’s Arena and the cow’s head is still in storage, but there may be a movement underway to restore the plaque and boulder and the cow’s head to their rightful places in the near future.

Update May 2020: Demolition and excavation of the Geosciences Building in the spring of 2020 revealed the following: “when the building was being torn down, exploratory digging only revealed old bricks and clay.”

The Rollo statue north of the Sons of Norway lodge in central Fargo is a century old. It was one of five Norwegian monuments erected in Fargo in the decade following Norway’s independence from Sweden in 1905, part of a resurgence in ethnic pride led locally by Dr. Herman O. Fjelde of Wahpeton.

Rollo was a Norse conqueror originally known as Gange Hrolf. After plundering various northern European kingdoms for thirty years, Hrolf agreed to Frankish King Charles the Fat’s offer of a duchy northwest of Paris and the king’s daughter’s hand in marriage in return for defending Charles’s kingdom against further Norse attacks. Hrolf also agreed, at least nominally, to accept Christianity, and he was baptized under the name of Rollon (later anglicized to Rollo).

The Fargo statue is one of three replicas of an 1865 work by the world-renowned artist Arsene Letellier. In response to requests from the Sons of Norway, officials from the French city of Rouen agreed to task the Norwegian Society of America with finding a suitable location for the statue. Fargo was selected over its chief rivals Eau Claire, Minneapolis, and Moorhead, Minnesota, and so some 15,000 spectators gathered outside the Great Northern Railway depot in downtown Fargo to witness the unveiling of the statue on July 12, 1912. The event was marred by a minor diplomatic incident when a University of Wisconsin professor made offensive remarks about Catholicism, incensing the French dignitaries present and souring relations between Rouen and Fargo.

The diminished public visibility of Rollo’s current location reflects a decline in the Norwegian cultural presence in Fargo. According to the 1910 Census, 16.5% of Cass County residents at the time were either Norwegian immigrants or first-generation Norwegian Americans. Unlike the great celebration that greeted the statue’s arrival nearly a century before, the rededication ceremony in 1990, when the statue was relocated, attracted only a handful of onlookers. The passing of the immigrant generation can be considered the main determinant in the reinterpretation of Rollo and his movement to a less visible location.

This does not necessarily mean that Rollo’s new place in Fargo’s culture is any less significant, however. Standing in full view from the entrance to the Sons of Norway Kringen Lodge, Rollo is now in the company of those whose ancestors brought him to Fargo. Perhaps it is there, near a thriving stronghold of Norwegian identity, where Rollo can most effectively memorialize the city’s Scandinavian heritage.–Research by Jared Sullivan, HIST 489, NDSU, Spring 2007

Each year the Saddle and Sirloin members, in conjunction with the Little International, choose an outstanding individual in the field of agriculture. The Agriculturist of the year is honored at the hall of Fame Banquet and his/her portrait is hung in the  Hall of Fame Gallery in Shepperd Arena.

As part of the celebration of the 90th anniversary of the Little Country Theater, theater professor Don Larew commissioned a sculpture titled: Theatre Passion, for the south lawn of Askanase Hall, which was unveiled in October 2003. The following is the design statement from the artist, Todd W. Johnson (NDSU, Class of 1997): “The sculpture rises from the ground much like a production is built-from the ground up and with hard work and determination. The performance is the ultimate goal-which is represented by the comedy and tragedy masks. The masks are made of stainless steel and will be polished to a chrome-like finish, much like the performances of the Little Country Theatre. These masks are supported by a strong and sturdy framework of steel. The support structure will be much rougher in texture than the masks. It will be weathered and hammered to express the great effort that goes into the art of producing theatre.”

On October 9, 1972, a statue of Theodore Roosevelt by Norwegian artist Gustav Vigeland was dedicated to the university and placed in Old Main. It is located in the south entry outside the President's office.

Located near the entrance to the NDSU Alumni Center, the memorial was dedicated on August 14, 2002, as part of a special two-day World War II reunion of NDAC veterans.

"The memorial has engraved stones for each of the branches of the military - Army, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard. A larger stone is engraved with the message, 'This place is dedicated to those who have served and are currently serving in the Armed Forces. Through their spirit, sacrifice and commitment, they have preserved our rights of life and liberty. These granite stones serve as a symbol of our appreciation for their efforts to maintain our freedom and also as a reminder of the moral strength and awesome power that can flow whenever a free people are united together for a common cause.'" (It's Happening at State, August 21, 2002, p. 1)