Airstream caravan brings cross-country visitors through Red River SRA
Anyone driving past Red River State Recreation Area's Sherlock Campground in East Grand Forks this past week may have noticed an unusual sight: more than twenty Airstream campers, hailing from as far away as Massachusetts, Vermont, Virginia, Tennessee, Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, parked side by side at the park. Eleven of the Airstreams belonged to members of the Northern Virginia Airstream Club, a traveling “caravan” group making its way to the 2026 Airstream Club International Rally in Minot, N.D., held Aug. 22-27, according to Catherine Johnson, seasonal park manager at Red River SRA. Known as NORVA, the club is one of four Airstream clubs in Virginia and belongs to the Region 3 division of Airstream Club International, which also includes North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. The club holds monthly weekend rallies in Virginia from March through November, and many members take part in longer national caravans, sometimes lasting two weeks to two months, on addition to their regular gatherings. On its website, the club sums up its travel philosophy this way: for its members, the appeal of Airstream travel is that “the journey is the destination.” The Virginia club's route took them from Virginia through Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, with stops that included Mackinac Island, before heading west on U.S. Highway 2 through the countryside of Minnesota's Upper Peninsula region and on toward North Dakota. “Red River SRA is particularly nice, and we appreciated the outstanding facility, hospitality and surrounding area,” said John Bevis, vice president of the Northern Virginia Airstream Club. “We wish we could have stayed longer.” Johnson said she'd been expecting the club's arrival — Bevis had been in touch with her since last fall, working out reservations and site assignments as the group planned its caravan route to Minot. What she hadn't anticipated was how many additional Airstream travelers, unaffiliated with the Virginia club but bound for the same rally, would also roll through the campground during the same stretch. “It was very refreshing to chat with so many friendly people from so many different areas of the country all heading to the same destination,” Johnson said. A special thank you to Catherine Johnson for sharing information and photos with The Exponent.
More than a long weekend: The working history behind Labor Day
Julie Bergman
julie@wiktel.com
America’s first Labor Day wasn’t a day off at all — for the 10,000 workers who took unpaid leave to march from New York City Hall to Union Square on September 5, 1882, it cost them a day’s pay to demand recognition for the labor that built the country. That march, organized by union leaders, is now considered the first Labor Day parade in U.S. history. Who exactly proposed the holiday is still debated by historians. Peter J. McGuire, a co-founder of the American Federation of Labor, is often credited with the idea, though many researchers now believe it was actually Matthew Maguire — a machinist who later led a New Jersey machinists’ local — who suggested it while serving as secretary of the Central Labor Union in New York. Either way, the goal was the same: set aside a day to honor “the laboring classes.” A holiday born from hard conditions The push for a workers’ holiday grew out of genuinely brutal working conditions. In the late 1800s, the average American laborer worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, just to scrape by, and children as young as five or six worked in mills, factories and mines for a fraction of adult wages. Unions organized strikes and rallies to push back, and some of those confrontations turned violent, including the 1886 Haymarket Riot in Chicago. The idea of a “workingmen’s holiday” caught on well beyond New York. After city ordinances recognized the day in 1885 and 1886, states began passing their own laws, with Oregon becoming the first to do so on February 21, 1887. Minnesota was part of that wave of state-level recognition in the years that followed, well before Congress acted. It took a national tragedy to make Labor Day a federal holiday. Congress passed the legislation in 1894, in the midst of a nationwide railroad workers’ strike. That strike traced back to the Pullman Palace Car Company’s wage cuts during the depression of the early 1890s, and after 13 workers died in the unrest that followed, President Grover Cleveland made peace with the labor movement a priority — signing the bill that made Labor Day a national holiday that same year. Why the first Monday in September? The date itself was set two years after that first march, when the Knights of Labor adopted a resolution establishing the first Monday in September as Labor Day, and the idea spread quickly from there. That timing has held for more than 130 years — this year, Labor Day falls on Monday, September 7.