Before I lean too far into this mid-morning, I wanted to get some process notes down on the A to Z of a beta version fabrication of an historic image displayed in the common area entry of the Heritage River Landing, aka and hereafter the landing (physical address at 1700 River Road, Bismarck, North Dakota 58503).
The below image is what I ended up with. And some notes below that provide the road map that got me there.
We started with this big chunk of blank wall that faces south, and if you stand where this image was taken, you can look at the wall, then out the glass doors south toward the BNSF-soon-to-be-razed Northern Pacific Railway bridge (substructure/piers date to 1880-1883, and superstructure to 1905). With all the blank white walls in the common area of the landing, I got some off the shelf LED track lights from Menards. And had them installed by a local electrician. We indeed all laugh when Clark Griswold told his father or father in law that he learned everything from him about exterior illumination. But interior illumination is just as important. For making things pop.
Back to the previous blank wall. I wanted local historical imagery to impress upon visitors. It strikes at those senses of history and senses of place — full sensory history. So the evening and weekend research proceeded.
There are a handful of popularized photographers whose works are still in tact today, largely due to one generation after the next deciding that what they photographed was of value. Frank Bennett Fiske. Frank Jay Haynes. David Francis Barry. Type these names into your search engines and you’ll find quite a bit. The Montana Historical Society has an excellent body of images from Haynes. David Barry’s stuff is kind of scattered, in private and public repositories (the Newberry Library in Chicago has some Barry stuff). Digital Horizons has solid online Frank Fiske stuff.
It’s easy to start clicking on these links and just get lost in the images, one after the other. While in the Haynes collection through Montana Historical Society’s online collection, I landed on the image before you. It was perfect: Haynes faced his camera south, just as the present visitor does today at the landing. The historic image shows the Missouri River bank and shoreline, just as visitors can see today (with added twentieth century Interstate 94 “Grant Marsh” bridge and U. S. Army Corps of Engineers riprap). This was the image. Even within the image were humans. With faces and eyes looking into the camera that the visitor could gaze into. And the eyes in this image gazed back to our own retinas here in the present. As we look at them, they look at us. Different time. Same space.
Next was to look into what type of resolution the image could be obtained. The Haynes images are high resolution. So I filled out the necessary image requests, submitted them through the non-profits Fort Abraham Lincoln Foundation (est. 1982) and Northern Plains Heritage Foundation (est. 2004), and FALF resources took care of the non-profit processing fees. A couple weeks later Montana Historical Society e-mailed me a link with the high resolution images for download. So images were now secured.
Then it was exploring the various online and local large scale high resolution print options. For whatever reason I found Banner Buzz, an online shop that does large scale (to me meaning larger than 36″) printing on polyester fabric at a sensible price point (looking at the receipt, it was $193.06). Nothing, mind you, was assured that my process journey was going to work. But I wanted to at least submit the high resolution photo, order this from Banner Buzz, and see what it looked like up close once it arrived in late May 2026.
It was fantastic.
After this I asked one of our dutiful staff, Grant Sundquist, to build a 1×3″ cedar frame for it to mount the fabric. He got the first draft of the frame all framed up. Then we placed it in the spot. And gazed at it. We did not frame it yet. We needed to look it over. Let it kind of work on us. We decided the skyline, though big, could be edited down. We really wanted the steamboats and the human subjects to be the central “oomph” to the eyes of visitors. So in the last couple days I edited up the frame with a chop saw, using a Bosch air nailer and air compressor. I used 1×2″ cedar strips (rough milled, or whatever it’s called) as the initial border.
After securing the 1×2″ border, and remembering to snag some digital images of this process, I then used the 1×3″ moulding to finish the front. And I added to the back two French cleats, the longest ones I could find at Bismarck Lowe’s.
All said, this was about $350 in materials. Online, I could not find anywhere to get this high resolution image printed up large enough and in a professional looking display for less than $2,000. I checked with a couple local shops, and found that local print shops often max out at 36″. The local banner and sign shops can go larger. And they have pro ways to mount it and all. But it’s often all of our human labor in this process that is understandably the most valuable and understandably the most cost. Usually.
Gonna rinse and repeat this process for a couple other walls at the landing. The image already has captured the attention of all commercial heritage vessel staff. There are calls for wanting more local steamboat images. And I’ll keep thinking about ways to impress the 30,000′ view upon viewers, that sort of micro and macro that Maya Jasanoff accomplished so well in her steamboat history work on Joseph Conrad.
The Edge of the Village 