Fergus Falls Chamber to honor Black veterans in Otter Tail County

Free admission at the Otter Tail County Historical Society will turn Juneteenth into a countywide history lesson, with Missy Hermes leading a program on Black veterans in Otter Tail County from the fur trade era through the Vietnam War. The museum event is set for Friday, June 19, and will end with lawn games, crafts and refreshments in Fergus Falls.

What gives the program weight is not the holiday format but the history it is recovering. The historical society already teaches an “African Americans in Otter Tail County” lesson that says many Black residents played a vital role in the county, and its outreach materials use photographs, artifacts, historical documents and live demonstrations to bring those stories to life. That matters because Otter Tail County’s military past has often been told through a narrow lens, while Black settlement, labor and service have sat in the background of the public record.

At the center of that wider story is Prince Albert Honeycutt, born into slavery in 1852. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, he moved from Civil War battlefields in Tennessee to Fergus Falls in 1872 after serving as a camp helper with the 52nd Illinois Infantry, then became the first Black professional baseball player in Minnesota, one of the state’s first Black firefighters and the first Black person to run for mayor. His life tied Black wartime service to the rise of Fergus Falls as a town, and it helped shape the community that grew around him.

The event will also connect Honeycutt’s story to the descendants of the first 85 Black settlers who built lives in Fergus Falls after the Civil War. A PBS profile of that community says 18 African American families arrived from Campbellsville, Kentucky in 1898, formed their own church, and preserved memories that later resurfaced through family reunions and gatherings honoring Honeycutt. The paper trail behind those families is still visible at the historical society, whose library holds local newspapers dating to 1871, census records, naturalization files, obituary indexes, cemetery records and World War I draft registrations. For Otter Tail County, that archive turns Juneteenth from commemoration into a clearer accounting of who served, who settled and who belonged in the county’s military past.