Minnesota's First Industry

Poets are quoted too seldom in business magazines, right? In 1995, Twin Cities Business took on a project that would have pleased Robert Browning, whose most famous line (from “Andrea del Sarto”) is “Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp”—suggesting that to achieve anything worthwhile, one should attempt things that might be impossible.

We attempted that summer to catalog all of the Minnesota companies that had been spun off from or started by former employees of Control Data and Engineering Research Associates, Inc. (ERA), where Control Data founder William Norris began his post-military career. We documented around 40 active companies that traced their lineage to ERA, including Aetrium, Inc., Analysts International Corporation, Hutchinson Technology, NTS Systems, and Seagate Technology, all of which remain active today. We knew, however, that we had missed at least as many entities that had prospered for a time but had later failed or been absorbed by other large companies.

That shortcoming prevented us from compiling a similar list of Minnesota-based medical device and biomedical companies that originated with Medtronic. There were more than 100 such businesses while founder Earl Bakken was still with Medtronic; there might be 200 by now. (Divestitures of operating units seem, by the way, to have helped Medtronic by allowing managers to focus on core missions. As the 19th-century poet Erin Majors wrote, “A candle loses nothing by lighting another candle.”)

The antecedents of Minnesota’s wood-products industry, which is larger and more diverse than you might suspect, are as easy to discern as those of our state’s information technology and biomedical industries. Today, 31 percent of Minnesota is forest. When the first European settlers began to arrive in Minnesota (then part of Wisconsin Territory) in the 1820s, they found about 60 percent of the state—31 million acres—filled with virgin red and white pine.

In 1838, David Hone and Lewis Judd, two Illinois investors, explored the white pine forests of the St. Croix River Valley and selected a site for a sawmill. A year later, Judd and another partner, a New Englander named Orange Walker, started the sawmill—Minnesota’s first manufacturing operation—on a six-acre site that is now within the city limits of Marine on St. Croix (12 miles north of Stillwater, population 700), which became Minnesota’s first community of European settlers. When I learned of Judd, my first thought was that a street should be named after him. One has been—in Marine on St. Croix.