This shop has been making and selling fine jewelry and other unique art pieces here since 1991. A look into its history reveals that creating art has been deep in this building’s DNA since it went up in 1893.

That was when photographer T.F. Bersagel, a Norwegian immigrant, created his photo studio here. (This building was special from the start—it even had a furnace in the basement!). Lanesboro was thirty years old by then, growing in population (in a few decades reaching an all-time high of 1,600), and enjoying a strong, if unpredictable, farm economy. Houses were being built, including grand Victorians in the southern neighborhood known as Brooklyn. More and more immigrants, many of them from Norway, were arriving by train every week.

Those people had left family, homes, farms, all they’d known, to travel thousands of miles across sea and land to create new lives in southeastern Minnesota. Staying connected to far-off loved ones in the “old country” was dear to them. In the days before telephones (never mind Facetime) that was a challenge, to say the least.

One “new” way to do that back then was to have your photo taken and placed on a “picture postcard” you could mail (for two cents) to loved ones back home. In today’s world of ever-handy camera-phones and “selfies,” it’s hard for us to imagine how valuable those photos must have been to those families.

In 1912 Bersagel sold his photo business to a fellow Norwegian immigrant, M.O. Bue, the town’s next great photographer. Bue worked from here for a dozen years then moved down the street to his new photo studio and gift shop. Now the “Windy Mesa,” this building housed a hat shop, a hair salon, a residence, and an antique dealer. Lots of uses, and in many ways, lots of great art.