Last updated: October 29, 2023
Place
Great Hall at Grand Portage
NPS Photo / GM Spoto
Quick Facts
Location:
Within the Historic Stockade
Significance:
Fur Trade History
Amenities
5 listed
Accessible Rooms, First Aid Kit Available, Historical/Interpretive Information/Exhibits, Junior Ranger Activity, Wheelchair Accessible
Meet in the Middle
The Depot at Grand Portage is the summer headquarters for the North West Company, and the Great Hall is the meeting room. Here, the owners of the company discussed necessary business with their clerks from the far reaches of the interior trading posts. The company owners traveled from Montreal to exchange information with the people acquiring furs across the riverways of the continent. When a day's business finished, tables were pushed aside for dancing and socializing to make up for long winters of isolation.
Today's Great Hall
The four partners' bedrooms are set up as exhibit spaces to further explain the story. One room is as a bedroom. Another shows the process from beaver to fine hat. A third room is a London street with products derived from fur bearers, and the fourth is set up as a trading post.
Selfie Station
A corner of the Great Hall is hung with blanket coats (capotes) and different hats for people to try on for memorable selfies.
Excavating History
This evening the gentlemen of the place dressed and we had a famous ball in the dining room, and for musick [sic] we had the bag-pipe the violin, the flute and the fife, which enabled us to spend the evening agreeably. At the ball were a number of this countries ladies, who danced not amiss.
Daniel Willaims Harmon at his first rendezvous as a new clerk for the NWCo, April 29, 1800
The dining hall Harmon wrote about was rediscovered by Minnesota Historical Society archeologist Ralph Brown during the fall of 1937. After delineating the stockade the previous summer, Brown discovered foundations inside the stockade constructed from fine-grained sandstone. Measuring 95 by 30 feet, the foundation is the largest inside the stockade. The first reconstructed Great Hall was completed in 1940 by the CCC Indian Division. It burned to the ground when struck by lightning in 1969. The Great Hall now standing was completed in 1972 and reflects the post and beam French-Canadian architecture common to NWCo depots.