“My dad was a French professor and we traveled to France quite a bit when I was growing up,” she related. “We’d walk through the streets, and it’s so layered with history. My sister and I would spend our days hanging out in the museums while he was teaching. It felt comfortable being in places like that.”

Dugan grew up in Ann Arbor, Mich., where her father taught at the University of Michigan and her mother worked in the lab as a biologist.

In high school, Dugan played the cello in the orchestra, participated in the Science Olympiad Club and played on the lacrosse team.

Following graduation, she was uncertain just what career she wanted to pursue, but since her mother was a scientist and her older sister was pursuing a doctorate in physics, she admitted there was “a science bent to things” around their household that intrigued her.

“I knew science was something that I was interested in, so I decided to go to Carleton College in Minnesota and study geology,” she explained. “For the first couple of years, I thought that was what I wanted to do – focusing either on teaching or field work. Then I realized my math and science skills weren’t as great as some of my other skills – and what I liked about it most was just looking at things closely and doing that sort of intense examination of them. That’s when I decided to switch over to art history. I had studied it a little bit in high school humanities, and it had always been in the background a little bit ever since.”

And what interested Dugan most about a career in art history – museum curating – was no doubt a throwback to her girlhood days exploring the great museums of Paris.

“The idea of working in a museum was something that really captured me,” she admitted, “ – to be able to walk into a place like that every day and have it be my office.”

Dugan earned her undergraduate degree at Carleton in 2000, and along the way, she also found her soul mate.

“I met my sweetheart, [Wrenshall High School graduate] Janaki Fisher-Merritt, when he was in his senior year and I was a junior,” she smiled. “We started dating, and the fall after my graduation I came up to northern Minnesota and worked in Duluth on an Ojibwe project for PBS with Lorraine Norgaard. I also worked at the Whole Foods Food Coop as a checkout person for a couple of years.”

She explained after Fisher-Meritt earned his liberal arts degree at Carleton, he worked for a year in the AmeriCorps “Farm Beginnings” land stewardship project in southern Minnesota and then moved home to rural Wrenshall to work in the family business – a sustainable farming operation that pioneered the highly successful Food Farm which supplies fresh, organically grown produce to a network of shareholders from throughout the region.

“Being a farmer and making it a viable career,” Dugan explained, “you really have to have that liberal arts sense of science, the way business works and the way people work. So much of that is interdisciplinary. You have to understand how the water cycle works and how the carbon cycle works, but you also have to understand, ‘How am I going to sell this to people?’ and ‘How am I going to budget and keep the books?’ I think he uses liberal arts training every day in the sense that he’s always having to fit all those different pieces together.”

She helped out at the Fisher-Merritt’s Food Farm operation from time to time in her spare time, and she came to appreciate all that it is – and all that it stands for.

“In the sense of sustainable markets that keep money in the community,” she reflected, “I think that almost as important as maintaining a healthy lifestyle is maintaining a healthy community. It’s neat to see there’s so much thought behind it. It’s exciting to be part of a partnership that supports the type of things it does.”

Still driven by a desire to work in the field of art history, however, when a position opened up in the education department at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Dugan applied for and landed the job.

“I moved back down to Minneapolis and worked there for a couple of years,” she said. “I was still dating Janaki, so that was hard to be in two different places.”

Her ticket to move back north came when the Duluth Art Institute restructured and advertised an opening for an education director. Dugan was successful in her bid for the position, which involved running their extensive program of classes in such pursuits as photography, fiber, clay and art. She also worked with schools and the Boys and Girls clubs.

“It was really good training for me,” she attested. “I got a great sense of how a nonprofit works.”

All along, Dugan had harbored a desire to pursue her master’s degree in art history, so she made the decision to enroll at Columbia University in New York City in order to realize that dream.

“From northern Minnesota, I went to living in Harlem,” she said, “and I walked to Columbia every day for classes. A friend of mine from college moved there at the same time, so the two of us went through it together. We’d go into the city during the day and then go home at night and decompress!”

Dugan earned her degree in art history and curatorial studies from Columbia last June and moved back to Minnesota.

“I knew I was going to come back to Minnesota permanently,” she said. “After a few years of trying out different things, I felt like I was really ready to come back, settle down and focus on something, but I was really apprehensive about what I was going to do. I knew there weren’t all that many jobs in my field in this area, so I was thinking I would have to make my own career or perhaps make my own business.”

Just as she was on her way back to Minnesota, however, she learned that the job as director of the Carlton County Historical Society was opening up due to the retirement of longtime director Marlene Wisuri.

“I was pretty excited when I heard about the opening,” Dugan said, “ – especially when I was offered the job!”

She job shadowed Wisuri for half of the month of August to learn more about what the job entailed, and her first day solo was Sept. 1.

Though the director’s job at the Historical Society was transitioned to a part-time position upon Wisuri’s retirement, Dugan said she hopes to accomplish as much as she possibly can during the four days a week she works there.

“I think the hard part is going to be figuring out what to focus on,” she said. “Coming into a position where Marlene did so much and one that’s now supposed to now be part time, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t want to cut any of this! It’s all so interesting and exciting!’”

Just as with Wisuri, Dugan said one of her personal priorities will be a rotating program of special historical displays at the History and Heritage Museum.

“The displays are more what my training was in, which is curatorial studies,” she said. “In November, we’re going to open a show called ‘How We Make it Through the Winter,’ to partner with Walter O’Meara’s book, ‘How We Made it Through the Winter’ and focusing on how we actually do make it through the winter. Today we may think it’s kind of a chore to scrape our car, shovel the driveway, heat the house and cook, but all those things we kind of take for granted now were a lot different 50 or 100 years ago.”

Dugan said the entire basement of the building is packed with materials – not just pictures but archived display items as well – which she likened to a “treasure hunt” when compiling a display.

“We don’t have the space to have them all on display all the time,” she said, “but we like to keep rotating them through at a fair pace so people know they can come back in a few months and see something new.

“It’s a neat thing for the community to have something they can show off – because this is a community center,” she continued. “It’s theirs and they can come as often as they like. A show on Depression glass will grab certain people and a show on lumberjacks will draw other types of people. We have to keep rotating what our theme is so we keep people interested.”

Dugan said she wants to keep the display on the history of Carlton up until the end of the year, and the staff is also working on a couple of pieces on Jay Cooke.

“We’ll have Christine Hiller from Jay Cooke come in and talk about the history of the park and do a slide presentation,” she outlined, “and we plan to have Allen Anway do a slide show of his photography. He has some beautiful pieces he’s done with a camera that takes the big negatives. A lot of the photographs in our collection were taken with cameras like that. And Larry Luukkonen is going to talk about the St. Louis River and its history as a trade route. We’re also planning to do a program about the Fires of 1918. We’re trying to do a couple of pown bag lunches, a couple of evening lectures and a couple of Saturday open houses so we can cover the board as far as people’s schedules.”

Moving forward, Dugan said she’d really like to partner with the area schools and start an education program.

“ I think that’s something we could grow into really, really well,” she commented.

She also praises the work of CCHS Collections Manager Harriette Niemi in getting new projects off the ground.

“She’s so positive and excited about the information,” said Dugan. “It can be infectious when you have someone who’s so thrilled about it all.”

Dugan and Fisher-Meritt live in Wrenshall in the farmstead formerly owned by Kenny and Margaret Holmes on the corner of County Road 1 and County Road 4.

“We’ve been there for four years, so it’s really feeling like home,” she said.

In fact, it was that very farmstead that inspired the two for a creative project that has since grown by leaps and bounds.

“Both of us really love movies,” said Dugan, “so we started the Free Range Film Festival three years ago in our barn. When we first moved in, it was just sitting there empty, and the previous owners had taken such good care of it. They had reroofed it and everything. I wasn’t so keen on maintaining animals, but we have a couple of friends who make independent movies and we told them, ‘We’ll have a premiere for you – in our barn!’ Then we got to wondering if there were other people from around here who would want to show their movies, too. We put it on a couple of Web sites, and we got movies from Germany, Australia, and lots of other places. We were amazed! The first year we had 60 movies submitted and actually showed about 30 of them.”

They also held a filmmakers round table so local film makers could meet each other and share ideas.

“A lot of times, for people who are doing arts in the area, it can be pretty isolating and they sometimes feel there is no one else doing what they’re doing,” explained Dugan. “We thought it would be valuable if we had something where we could ping those people together to share resources, equipment and that sort of thing.”

The first year the Free Range Film Festival was held the last weekend in July, the two figured they’d have about 30 people attend over the course of the weekend event – and much to their surprise, it turned out to be 300!

“We had to rig up a second screen the second day,” recalled Dugan. “We just had a screen in the hayloft the first day, but the second day we cleared out a cow corral downstairs and put down hay bales so we could fit another screen down there. The past two years we’ve had three screens. There’s a lean-to on the barn, and so we’ve put a third screen in there. We show everyone the same movie, but there’s three different places for people to sit. The number of people attending has grown, and we’ve had something like 500 people each year over the course of the weekend.”

Dugan said the film festival has been a lot of fun – and a good way to stay involved in the arts on a personal level.

“There was some trepidation for me, moving here from the Twin Cities and New York, that there wasn’t going to be any culture or anything to do,” Dugan admitted. “It was neat to realize that there is, and if we can make something of it ourselves, more will come.”

Dugan said she may eventually like to carry the film festival idea over to the historical society to encourage folks to make films with a historical perspective and perhaps engage even more folks in the fascinating endeavor of pinging the area’s past to light.

“I’d especially like to continue the legacy of the historical society as a community center,” she mused. “I think it’s amazing that our membership list is as big as St. Louis County’s, when you consider the size of our county compared to theirs. I was surprised to discover how many people come in just to chat about what’s going on – and what has gone on in the past.”