Another Minn. runestone? Mysterious stone lost for decades returns to Roseau

More than 100 years ago, a Roseau County settler found an odd stone in his garden. Not much bigger than a bottlecap, the stone had a pattern of markings that its finder, Jake "Yankee" Nelson, thought might be some sort of ancient language.

Word of the strange stone got out, and several scholars studied it in the following years.

It eventually wound up in the hands of Theodore Blegen, a University of Minnesota historian and dean who died while he still had the stone. It was swept up with his professional papers and sent off to the university archives, where it sat forgotten in a box for decades.

Now the Roseau Stone is back where it was found, and visitors to the Roseau County Museum will be able to view it when it goes on display this summer.

"It's one of those things that you can't really explain, but here it is," said Britt Dahl, the museum's director and curator. "I'm excited to have it back here. It's a unique piece that's got a lot of history behind it."

The stone's rebirth began a decade or so ago, after the U archives began cataloging its holdings online, said archivist Erik Moore. The scholarly papers of Blegen, who died in 1969, included a reference to the stone.

Sometime after Blegen's papers were listed online, the university got an inquiry about the stone from a scholar who came in and viewed it. That spurred the U to look into the stone's history, and it was included in a public display at the archives in 2011.

Slowly, word of the stone's rediscovery seeped out. Within the past couple of years, Dahl said, a sentiment took hold in Roseau County that the stone should reside there, not at the U.

The museum enlisted state Rep. Dan Fabian, who represents the area in the Minnesota House of Representatives, to lobby for the stone's return.

In Fabian's view, "it should be on display, and it should be on display in Roseau," he said. "My role was just to nudge these conversations a little more."

Last month, Dahl drove to Minneapolis and picked up the stone, which lay in a box with a fascinating history of its own, bearing notations on everyone who ever borrowed it.

And now for the main question: Are those really runic carvings or just naturally occurring impressions?

Opinions have differed over the years, as Moore explained in an article for the U libraries.

An early proponent of the rune stone theory was John Jager, a prominent Minneapolis architect who studied the stone in the 1920s and drew some fascinating sketches of his interpretation. Several U scholars studied the stone in the 1930s and said the markings were natural.

Moore said he tends toward the natural theory. However, he said, there's a third possibility: that the markings aren't runic — which would be associated with Scandinavian or Russian cultures — but originate with even earlier settlers, possibly Native Americans or even their predecessors.

The stone was found with several Indigenous tools and arrowheads, which could lend credence to the notion that it was created by ancient people.

Moore isn't ready to proclaim that theory as fact, but "the oddity of the stone is just enough" to make the idea intriguing, he said.

As for Dahl, she's firmly in the human-origin camp.

"To me, I would say it's something of human nature," she said. "It's a perfect ribbon around the stone. It seems odd that that would be something of nature."

And, she added, "I want everybody to come see it."

John Reinan • 612-673-7402