Industry History | 3M — One Thousand Dollars Each in John Dwan's Law Office
· 1902-6
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Industry History | 3M — One Thousand Dollars Each in John Dwan's Law Office
kevin
People treat 3M as a Maplewood campus that always sold Post-it Notes and sandpaper from a glass research park.
The first book was a mining company that mined the wrong rock.
On 13 June 1902 five Two Harbors men — lawyer John Dwan, physician J. Danley Budd, butcher Hermon W. Cable, and railroad men Henry S. Bryan and William A. McGonagle — signed Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing into being in Dwan's clapboard office on Poplar Street, now 201 Waterfront Drive.
Each put in one thousand dollars in 1902 dollars.
They had bought mineral rights on about three hundred acres at Crystal Bay, sure the rock was corundum for grinding wheels.
It was anorthosite.
The mine failed. The Duluth sandpaper plant of 1905 sagged under wet local grit. St. Paul investor Lucius P. Ordway kept the book alive and moved the works to the East Side of Saint Paul in 1910.
William L. McKnight, hired as an assistant bookkeeper in 1907, later ran the firm that paid its first dividend in 1916.
The mechanism is the same one visitors now walk through in the Dwan building: a company that started by being wrong about a mineral learned to make abrasives from imported stone, then tape, then the rest of the catalog.
The office was moved a block in 1909 and listed on the National Register in 1992. It is the 3M Birthplace Museum, run with the Lake County Historical Society.
A visitor standing on Waterfront Drive is standing where the articles were signed, not where the tape was invented.
The campus is in Maplewood.
The signature is in Two Harbors.
Photo: Elkman, John Dwan Office Building, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons.
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