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

People treat 3M as a Maplewood campus and a ticker in the Dow.

The articles that created the company were signed in this Two Harbors law office.

On 13 June 1902 five men met in John Dwan's office on what is now Waterfront Drive and incorporated Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. Each put up 1,000 dollars in 1902 currency.

The five were Dwan, a local attorney; Dr. J. Danley Budd; meat merchant Hermon W. Cable; and Duluth and Iron Range Railroad officers Henry S. Bryan and William A. McGonagle.

They meant to mine corundum at Crystal Bay, on the North Shore, and sell it east as an abrasive for grinding wheels and sandpaper.

The rock was anorthosite, a feldspar with no commercial value as an abrasive. The first cargo did not save the balance sheet.

St. Paul investor Lucius P. Ordway put new money in. In 1905 the firm moved to Duluth to make sandpaper from purchased mineral. In 1910 Ordway moved manufacturing again, to the East Side of St. Paul, beside the railroad.

Dwan's office remained the official boardroom until 1916, the year the company paid its first dividend, 6 cents a share.

3M stock listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 14 January 1946 under the symbol MMM. The legal name became 3M Company in 2002, a century after this signing.

The building itself dates to 1898. The Lake County Historical Society bought it in 1991. It entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1992 and operates as the 3M Birthplace Museum.

The pin is the public museum on Waterfront Drive. The interior is a ticketed exhibit, not an office.

The mechanism is a mining charter that survived a worthless claim by becoming a manufacturer, then a listed industrial that still pays a quarterly dividend.

Photo: McGhiever, 2013, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The John Dwan Office Building, now the 3M Birthplace Museum.