Minnesota

The notable development of the university College of Agriculture at St. Anthony Park cannot here have adequate room, but mention must be made of one of its auxiliaries, the so-called “School of Agriculture.” From the year 1868, when the agricultural college lands were merged with those of the university, the regents and faculty of the university had exerted themselves in all good faith to gather students into the agricultural college which they had promptly organized on paper. The farmers’ boys flocked to the university, not to learn agriculture but to practice it. Only occasionally could any be induced to enroll in that college. Up to 1888 not fifty had so done, and but one had completed the course and been graduated. The first president had declared that there was no proper work for an agricultural “college” to do, and that agricultural schools of secondary rank must be organized. Professor Edward A. Porter of the university department of agriculture, after some years of experiment and reflection, became convinced that such a school should be undertaken, and that, not on the university campus, but on the experimental farm some two miles away. He brought the board of regents to his opinion through the influence of an “advisory board of farmers” which he induced them to appoint. State Superintendent D. L. Kiehle, a member of the board of regents ex-officio, worked out the pedagogical details, and early in 1888 submitted the plan of a “school” of agriculture to receive students of fifteen and over, with a common-school training, for a term extending from November to April. His idea was to make the instruction practical in the branches immediately related to agriculture, cultivating powers of observation and judgment, and arousing interest in and taste for country life. The school was opened October 18, 1888, with forty-seven students. Young women were admitted in 1897, and a second-year course has been added. The school expenses proper do not exceed eighty-five dollars a year. The enrollment of students for 1908 was 581, and the whole number since 1888 is 4608. A notable fact is that this “school” has stimulated and fed the “college” of agriculture, 69 students having been graduated since the opening of the school. The framers of the “Morrill bill” of 1857-62, granting public lands for the endowment and support of colleges of agriculture and mechanic arts, could have had no expectation of any such use of the grant, and doubtless would have provided against devoting it to elementary education. The industrial education had yet to be invented for this country. But this school of agriculture is far better for the practical farmer than any college could be.

One department of the school of agriculture of the university has had no small part in working a great change in Minnesota agriculture. While the state as a whole will long retain a leading place as a wheat producer, all southern Minnesota has abandoned that cereal as a principal crop. Supplied from the department of dairy husbandry of the school of agriculture with expert operators of creameries and cheese factories, the farmers of many counties have turned to dairying. Minnesota butter, thanks to the science and practice taught in the school, commands a premium in the market, and its annual output has run up to near 100,000,000 pounds. Minnesota has become the “Bread and Butter State.” The total dairy product of Minnesota in 1907 may be safely valued at $40,000,000. Along with dairying has naturally grown up an extensive animal husbandry, profitably converting into marketable forms the forage crops of great areas.

At the experiment station conducted in the agricultural department of the university new varieties of grains, in particular wheat, have been developed by careful breeding and selection, which promise much to Minnesota farmers.

Adjoining the agricultural establishment of the university is the domain of two hundred acres and more on which the Minnesota State Agricultural Society, in a vast range of buildings and inclosures, holds its annual fair in September. Given this permanent location in 1885, the society has developed a great industrial museum of high educational value.

For many years after the white man built his sawmills on Minnesota rivers it was believed that the pine forests north and east of the Sioux-Chippeway intertribal boundary of 1825 could never be exhausted. A generation ago that belief was given up, but exhaustion was thought to be so far away that people then living need not worry about it. There being no public control over private lumbering, the reckless, indiscriminate, ruinous methods of the pioneer operators were continued. Young growing trees went down along with those old and ripe for the axe. Within a few years it has become apparent to all who concern themselves, that the days of Minnesota lumbering in the old piratical fashion are numbered. Had a reasonable forest policy been established fifty years ago, permitting only the annual cutting of ripe trees and leaving the young to grow, a harvest of lumber might have been reaped in perpetuity. There are millions of acres of land in the state which are fit only for forest growth and will some day be so devoted. An act of the legislature of 1899 created a state forestry board, which has already outlined a policy and begun the immense work of re-afforesting despoiled areas. Another act, that of 1905, provides for a forest commissioner, and to that office has been appointed General C. C. Andrews, who for many years has been the apostle of forest preservation and replanting in Minnesota.

In 1878 the state geologist, Professor N. H. Winchell, announced the existence of iron ore fit for steel production about Vermilion Lake in St. Louis County; but neither the university nor the state authorities took sufficient interest to cause a proper examination of the region to be made. George C. Stone of Duluth conducted explorations whose revelations led to the formation of the Minnesota Iron Company and the building of the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad in 1884. In that year 62,122 tons of ore were shipped from the mine opened at Tower. Four years later the railroad was extended to Ely, and 54,612 tons were carried from the Chandler mine. The product of the Vermilion range increased with astonishing rapidity. It was near a half million tons in 1888, and double that figure four years later.

Marvelous as had been the development of the Vermilion range, it was eclipsed by that of another of which geologists had detected but faint indications. In November 1890, an exploring party of the Merritt Brothers of Duluth found iron ore at a point west of Virginia, near which the Great Mountain iron mine was later opened. A year after one of their explorers found ore turned up by the roots of a fallen tree. A shaft sunk on the spot struck the ore body of the Biwabik mine. From these beginnings date the developments of the Mesabi iron range, lying some twenty miles south of and parallel with the Vermilion range, but extending much farther to the west. In 1892, 4245 tons of ore were shipped over the railroads which had been built out from Duluth to the Mesabi mines. Three years later the shipments were nearly three millions of gross tons; in 1900 they had swelled to nearly eight millions, and in 1907 they touched twenty-seven and a half millions. The shipment in the year last named from a certain single mine was 2,900,493 tons. The Mesabi ores are of the “soft” variety, lie near the surface, and are in large part mined by means of steam shovels dumping into cars; these, in the shipping season, are at once dispatched to the lake ports, where the ore is transferred to vessels which carry it below. The output of the Vermilion range has remained under two millions a year, except in a single case. The ores of both ranges are of the variety known as hematite, with great differences of physical structure. Much of them yield seventy per cent. of pure metal. Ore containing less than fifty-five per cent. of iron is not now considered marketable, and there are enormous masses of such low grade ore left untouched by the mine operators. At least 1,500,000,000 tons of ore marketable under present conditions have been located and measured. The state tax commission in 1907 raised the valuation of 2116 ore properties, containing 1,192,509,757 tons, from $64,500,000 in 1906 to $189,500,000.

An act of Congress of 1873 expressly excepted Minnesota from the operation of the mining laws of the United States, leaving all her mineral lands open to settlement or purchase in legal subdivisions, like agricultural or timbered lands, thus virtually giving to lucky speculators these priceless ore deposits. Up to 1889 the state pursued the same policy, selling her school and swamp lands containing ore at the annual sales and getting the usual prices for arable lands. In 1889 the legislature provided for the leasing of ore properties for fifty years at a royalty of twenty-five cents per ton. At this rate, less than one third that obtained by private mine owners, the school fund will be splendidly enriched. The receipts from royalties and contracts in 1907 were $273,433.

At the close of the year 1907 the railroads of Minnesota had increased their mileage to 8023 miles, having almost doubled it in twenty years. The Supreme Court of the United States in the Blake case, decided in 1876, had affirmed the right of the state of Minnesota to regulate railroad fares and rates, according to the pleasure of the legislature. In 1890 came a decision from the same tribunal in another Minnesota case to the effect that any regulation, whether by statute or through a commission, must be subject to judicial review. The legislature could not deprive a railroad company of its property – rents, issues, and profits included – without due process of law, much less could a commission. This decision with others of the period materially moderated the effect of the “granger cases.” Another litigation arising in the state was of national importance. A small clique of capitalists who had bought control of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railway systems, each of eight thousand miles and more, desiring to operate them as one property or interest, formed a third corporation called the Northern Securities Company. It was chartered in New Jersey, November 13, 1900, with an authorized capital stock of $400,000,000. When duly organized this company proceeded to exchange its own stock for the stocks of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific, and absorbed more than three fourths of them. This consolidation, effecting a monopoly of all traffic between the Mississippi and the Pacific coast for five degrees of latitude, caused the greatest alarm. Governor Van Sant used every means at his disposal to prevent its consummation. A suit, brought by the state in one of her district courts alleging violation of her statute forbidding the consolidation of parallel and competing roads, removed to the Circuit Court of the United States, was there decided against the state on the ground that the Northern Securities was not a railroad company, but a mere “holding company.” An appeal was taken to the Supreme Court of the United States, but that court declined to review the action below because the case had been improperly removed from the Minnesota court. Without waiting for the result of this suit, the Attorney-General of the United States sued in the Circuit Court of the United States for Minnesota, charging infraction of the “Sherman anti-trust law” of 1890. That court, after elaborate hearings, found the Northern Securities Company to be an unlawful combination in restraint of trade, and ordered its dissolution. As was expected, an appeal was taken to the Supreme Court, where in March, 1904, the decision below was affirmed, the chief justice and three associates dissenting. Under judicial direction the Northern Securities Company proceeded to return the stocks taken in exchange, and at length went into dissolution. The same men own the two roads still.

Early in the year 1908 the Supreme Court of the United States considered that the Circuit Court for the District of Minnesota had the right to punish the attorney-general of Minnesota for attempting, in disobedience of its process, to enforce a state law regulating railroad rates, held to be obnoxious to the national constitution.

Minnesota enjoys a great advantage in point of transportation to both oceans in the competition of Canadian roads, with branches penetrating to her principal cities. The water route eastward from Duluth has moderated costs of shipping out her staple products – grain, ore, and lumber – and given her favorable rates on returning merchandise.

The new states of the Northwest have departed far from the conservative doctrine that governments exist merely for the protection of persons and property. Two examples of this departure in Minnesota may be mentioned. In 1899 the legislature created the Minnesota Public Library Commission. Its duties are to maintain (1) a bureau of information on library matters, (2) a circulating library, and (3) a clearing-house for periodicals. From the circulating library, “traveling libraries” of twenty-five or fifty volumes are sent to small towns and rural communities on payment of a small fee. Home study and juvenile libraries are also sent out, and small collections in five different foreign languages. No provision for the general culture could be more popular.

Equally acceptable have been the ministrations of the Minnesota State Art Society, organized under an act of 1903. This body manages periodical art exhibitions, offers and awards prizes for excellence in artistic work, and will ultimately form a permanent collection. The exhibitions, held in St. Cloud, Mankato, and Winona have been of great educational value.

Minnesota lies between the latitudes of 43 degrees, 30 minutes, and 49 degrees north, and the longitudes of 89 degrees, 29 minutes, and 97 degrees, 15 minutes west. Her extreme dimensions are therefore about 380 miles from north to south and 350 miles from east to west. Her situation is not far from the geographical centre of the North American continent, and the drainage from the Itascan plateau falls into Hudson’s Bay, the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and the Gulf of Mexico. The lowest land is at the head of Lake Superior, whose surface is 602 feet above sea-level. The highest land, a granite peak of the Misquah hills in Cook County, is 2230 feet above sea-level. The annual mean temperature is 44 degrees Fahrenheit; that of the summer months, 70 degrees. The climate has proved favorable to health and industry.

By the state census of 1905 the total population of Minnesota was 1,979,912, including 10,920 Indians, 171 Chinese, and 50 Japanese. The native born were 1,424,333. Of the 537,041 foreign-born persons, 262,417 came from the Scandinavian kingdoms, 119,868 from Germany, 84,022 from English-speaking countries. The average yearly increase for the decade closing in 1905 was 40,529; for the five-year period, 22,852. The urban population was 1,048,922, equal to 53 per cent. of the total. In the same decade the urban population had increased 38 per cent., while the rural population had augmented but 14.5 per cent. The most notable examples of urban development are in the “twin cities” of Minneapolis and St. Paul, their aggregate population in 1905 being 458,997. If the suburban dwellers within easy “trolley” ride be added, that number rises to more than half a million. Although the two municipalities have long been coterminous, they may remain politically separate for many years, if not indefinitely.

POPULATION OF MINNESOTA FOR TWELVE CENSUS YEARS.