Finance History|201 Waterfront Drive, Two Harbors — Five Thousand Dollars and the Wrong Rock

People treat 3M as a Maplewood campus that later listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The first office was a lawyer's room on this street. On 13 June 1902 five Two Harbors men signed the papers that created Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company in John Dwan's law office at what is now 201 Waterfront Drive. Each put up 1,000 dollars in 1902 money. The five were Dwan, the physician J. Danley Budd, the butcher Hermon W. Cable, and the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad men William A. McGonagle and Henry S. Bryan. They meant to mine corundum on the North Shore and sell it east as grit for grinding wheels. The rock they took was anorthosite, a poor abrasive. Sales of the first load did not save the plan. The firm moved to Duluth in 1905 to make sandpaper from bought mineral, then to Saint Paul in 1910 after Lucius Pond Ordway put in the money that kept the books open. Dwan's office stayed the official boardroom until 1916, the year the company paid its first dividend. The mineral error is the mechanism. A mining company that could not mine what it thought it owned had to become a manufacturer of abrasives, then of the adhesives that held the grit, then of the tapes and notes that grew from that adhesive work. The building itself predates the firm. It went up in 1898 as Dwan's office. The Lake County Historical Society bought it in 1991, listed it on the National Register the next year, and opened it as the 3M Birthplace Museum. The pin is the standing office, not the vanished Crystal Bay pit. Photo: McGhiever, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.