My Country, 'Tis of Tea — North Dakota

I must confess that I was a little nervous about being able to find three factoids concerning tea in North Dakota, but it ended up being a piece of cake. Or at least a cookie. (See item #2.)

• Do you see a tea kettle here? As in, Tea Kettle Butte in Pyramid Park, North Dakota? This image from the Library of Congress website was said to have been taken sometime between 1909 and 1932 by photographer F. Jay Haynes. According to Webster's, a butte, pronounced “byüt," is "an isolated hill or mountain with steep or precipitous sides usu. having a smaller summit area than a mesa." I've seen the same image on a vintage postcard, and it was described as "a picturesque scene in the Bad Lands" of western North Dakota. No word on who decided this looked like a tea kettle. Or what they were sipping at the time … 

• One category of tea photo I’ve discovered this year might be titled “Politicians’ Wives Taking Tea.” (Of course today that would be “Political Spouses Taking Tea,” but it was “wife” back in the day.) When I visited the photo archives of the State Historical Society of North Dakota, it led me here, to a photo titled “Legislative wives’ tea at Governor’s Mansion, Bismarck, N.D.” This was taken in 1963, and it’s fun to note the Queen Elizabeth—style pocketbook, the hat, and the vintage eyeglasses. The women are identified as "Mrs. Ole Breum, Mrs. Esther Wenstrom, Mrs. Walter Christenson, Mrs. Otto Hauf.” (Why is Esther the only one who’s not referred to by her husband’s name?) I just wish the photo were in color so I could tell what kind of teacups and treats those were!

• During prohibition, North Dakota was the fourth state—and the first one outside the South—to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment, the federal prohibition amendment. (The first three were Mississippi, Virginia, and Kentucky.) I found this little tidbit in the January 1919 issue of The National Advocate, a temperance publication, which noted, “The wave of prohibition in the United States bids fair to cause a financial swell in the tea gardens of China, Ceylon and Japan, if the figures and facts presented by the National City Bank of New York in its foreign trade record on ‘Tea Consumption Increased by Prohibition,’ are correct. The bank has discovered that there has been a great increase in the amount of tea imported into the United States, and the inference is made that the spread of prohibition has increased the consumption of tea.” (And yet we always talk about Prohibition as if it were entirely a bad thing!)
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