Industry History | 3M — Incorporation Papers on Waterfront Drive

People treat 3M as a Maplewood campus that always made tape and notes.

The first company was a mine that dug the wrong rock.

On 13 June 1902 five Two Harbors men signed Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing into being in John Dwan's law office on Poplar Street, now Waterfront Drive.

Each put in $1,000 in 1902 dollars.

The signers were Dr. J. Danley Budd, Henry S. Bryan, William A. McGonagle, John Dwan and Hermon W. Cable.

The plan was to quarry corundum at Crystal Bay for grinding wheels and sandpaper.

The rock was anorthosite, a feldspar with no abrasive market.

Edgar Ober and Lucius P. Ordway took control in 1905 and moved sandpaper making to Duluth.

William L. McKnight joined as an assistant bookkeeper in 1907.

In 1910 Ordway shifted the plant to Saint Paul's East Side beside the Omaha railroad, where he could watch a company that already owed him a quarter of a million dollars.

The first dividend came in 1916.

The legal name became 3M Company only at the 2002 centennial.

The mechanism that survived is the one forced by the bad mine: buy abrasive elsewhere, police quality, and keep a lab that later produced Three-M-ite cloth, Scotch tape and Post-it notes.

The 1898 Dwan office is on the National Register and now holds the 3M Birthplace Museum, run by the Lake County Historical Society.

Photo: John Dwan Office Building, Two Harbors, via Wikimedia Commons.