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Chengwatana was a historical community near the present town of Pine City occupied from 1848 to the early 1870s. Chengwatana was the original Seat of Pine County and served as a military post in the 1860s. Railroad construction in the 1870s bypassed Chengwatana in favor of Pine City, and the former town disappeared as a result.

Birk conducted a brief, walkover survey of the Chengwatana site in 1988 for the Cross Lake Association (CLA) of Pine City in 1988. Later that year Birk agreed to include Chengwatana as a subject of a series of edited historical manuscript publications for the CLA, to also include John Sayer’s Diary and the records of the Pokegama Mission. Birk identified the correspondence of Judge Charles Daly, held by the New York Public Library, as the main source for his proposed “Chengwatana Papers.” This project ran into trouble when the CLA dropped their participation in 1990, leaving Birk to renegotiate the conditions of the grant funded by the MHS. As a compromise, Birk agreed to focus on the Pokegama Mission papers only (Purveyors of Salvation) and dropped work on the Chengwatana publication.