- Hi, this is Chris Schuelke with the Otter Tail County Historical Society in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.

And this is our "Artifact Spotlight."

(gentle music) So the first permanent settlement in Otter Tail County was a religious settlement, religious pilgrims, a group known as Cutlerites and they formed the first permanent settlement known as Clitherall.

The Cutlerites was a Mormon spinoff group.

Their leader was a man named Alpheus Cutler.

Alpheus Cutler quickly rose in the church hierarchy and after the death of Joseph Smith, he became one of the leaders.

When the group was living in southwestern Iowa community known as Manti, they decided to split with the larger Mormon group led by Brigham Young.

So this group that stayed with Alpheus Cutler became known as Cutlerites.

Now, while they were in Iowa, they were actually quite prosperous.

But Cutler had a vision, a dream, that they should move to the new state of Minnesota and seek out land between two lakes.

Well, there are thousands of lakes in Minnesota.

In fact, there are over 1,000 lakes in Otter Tail County alone.

So a scouting party left Iowa, eventually made their way to Otter Tail County and to a spot between West Battle Lake and Clitherall Lake, and that's where the Cutlerites set up their community of Clitherall.

It was actually based on four homesteads.

One of the leaders of the Cutlerite Church was a man named Chancey Whiting.

This is a portrait of Chancey Whiting and his wife Editha.

Whiting became the president of the Cutlerite Church.

And in his later years, he wrote scores of letters and also was a correspondent for the Fergus Falls Daily Journal.

And so much of what we know about the community and the church came from the writings of Chancey Whiting.

They farmed, they hunted, and they had their own wagon shop and tin shop and furniture shop.

Now, the chairs that we have here were made by Almon Whiting.

The Whitings were an important family in the Clitherall community.

Almon Whiting made these simple, sturdy chairs.

They don't have a lot of adornment.

There's a little painting on one of the chairs.

Typically of the Cutlerites, there's no major adornment.

They entertain themselves with music.

Francis Lewis Whiting had this fiddle that was used and also by actually several generations later.

It's important that we learn about the Cutlerites because they actually preceded the main settlement to Otter Tail County, which took place after the Civil War.

People took advantage of the Homestead Act.

You had your Scandinavian immigrants and Northern European immigrants, but the Cutlerites were here before that.

They actually left Iowa when the Civil War was still taking place.

So they preceded that great westward movement and were very much a religious community.

They came to Otter Tail County basically to get away from civilization so they could practice their religion and their community amongst themselves, and were very important actually in the early development of the county.

When Otter Tail County was formed in 1868, the first meeting was held at the home of Marcus Shaw, who was a Cutlerite.

So Otter Tail County was formed in a Cutlerite home and several of the early county commissioners were Cutlerites, including Chancey Whiting.

These are artifacts, again, that represent a time and a period that no longer exists.

And if we don't know about this, then we lose part of our history.

And so one of the reasons, the main reason, that we keep these pieces is that we keep a part of our heritage alive for people of future generations to learn about.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.