By Charlie Rhodes, Vivian Du, and Audrey McCormick

Introduction
Over its forty years of history, the Women’s League Cabin witnessed various Carleton student organizations wax and wane while standing tranquilly in the northeast corner of the Lower Arb. Despite serious break-ins and vandalism from early on, the Cabin remained a desired retreat site for not only Carls but the local community surrounding the campus. As the need for repairs emerged, negotiations between students and the College’s administration regarding the ownership and management of the Cabin also reflected operational issues within the student governing body in the last century. Delving into the architectural history of the Women’s League Cabin, our group focused on the building’s upkeep, remodeling, and ultimate demolition. Archival records provided us with sufficient evidence to construct a coherent narrative about the Cabin’s development, as outlined in the timeline below.

Another part of our project revolved around finding the exact geographical location of the Women’s League Cabin and aligning historical Cabin floor plans with modern GPS coordinates. With the help of the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), we were able to collect real-time coordinates at the site and then match them with specific control points on ArcGIS. This allowed us to recreate an overall layout of the Cabin site. We further enhanced visualization by superimposing historical images of the Cabin on recent ones at roughly the same angles at which the historical photos were originally taken. Virtual reality was also incorporated to give anyone who has never been to the Cabin site a quick look of it. Click on buttons below to explore our discoveries with technology!

Methodologies

We employed a variety of methods and equipment to try to accomplish an integrated interdisciplinary project. The tools we used for GIS mapping include the physical cm-accuracy data collection Trimble receiver, Trimble Mobile, the Field Maps app, ArcGIS Pro, and ArcGIS Online. The advanced statistical equations embedded in the ArcGIS software helped us calculate the relative locations of places we pinpointed on both the historical floor plan and the aerial photo of Dakota County in 1951. To create a virtual reality of the WLC, we took 3D photos and videos and processed them with GoPro Player and Adobe Premiere softwares. For archival research, we visited the Carleton Archives and conducted a detailed review of all textual documents related to the conception and evolution of the Cabin’s architecture. With both second-hand information from the past and first-hand information from the present, we rendered nascent representations of a bygone object, combining traditional humanities research methods with hands-on technological implementations.

Conclusions

Although georeferencing was relatively straightforward and objective compared to parsing oral histories and written records, we still needed to perform a significant amount of interpretative analysis when it came to deciding which points on the site to collect and which points to use to rectify locations and achieve the lowest error. We learned that it was inevitable to make mistakes which induced errors throughout the data collection and modeling process, but gladly the results turned out decently acceptable. It was a shame that we were not able to locate the water pump or the 2015 excavation units, which could have offered great additional information on the general geographical layout of the Women’s League Cabin site. Future work is recommended to focus on digging about four meters north of our Excavation Unit 2A (as we suspected that to be where the chimney could have actually been) and dating the conifer trees at the site using an increment borer (suggested by the Arb Director Nancy Braker). Overall, we were excited to have discovered how the Cabin rose and fell over a forty-year period and sketched new depictions of the site traversing now and decades ago.

Bibliography

Images of the Women’s League Cabin. Digitized September 2015. Cowling Arboretum Collection. No Local Identifier. Carleton College Cowling Arboretum archives, Carleton College, Northfield, MN. https://contentdm.carleton.edu/digital/collection/Arb/id/3802/rec/10.

Gould Library Archive, In RE: Women’s League Cabin (from Bruce Pollock to Mr. Moline), note, March 26, 1942, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Untitled (Bruce Pollock to Mr. W. W. Vocht), letter, March 9, 1945, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Application for Electric Service, application, November 23, 1949, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Untitled (Jan Hollis and Jane Zienty to Miss Phillips), letter, April 23, 1969, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Untitled, typewriter cutout, February 5, 1971, Gould Library Archive, Northfield, MN. 

Gould Library Archive, Untitled (George-Ann Davis to Dean Phillips), letter, March 9, 1971, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Untitled (Kirbyjon Caldwell to unknown), memo, September 18, 1974, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Cabin Report, Fall, 1993, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Untitled (Deb Schmidt and Karen Wirtz to Bruce Colwell), Memorandum, June 2, 1993 Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Women’s League Cabin History, historical summary, date unknown (between 1977-1997), Gould Library, Northfield, MN. 

Gould Library Archive, Recommendations, renovation recommendations, May 17, 1994, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Untitled ( to Greg McCraken), report, May 23, 1994,Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Untitled (unknown to Randy), Post-It note, October 1994, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Charles R. Gleason Co. Bid, demolition bid, June 1, 1998, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

Gould Library Archive, Charles R. Gleason Co. Invoice, invoice, June 5, 1998, Gould Library, Northfield, MN.

The Women’s League Cabin and Blueprints [Original and Retyped]. Digitized May 2015. Cowling Arboretum Collection. 1977_women’s_cabin_with_blueprints_kleigel78_dstewart.pdf. Carleton College Cowling Arboretum archives, Carleton College, Northfield, MN. https://contentdm.carleton.edu/digital/collection/Arb/id/3750/rec/10.