(continued)

The rails filled an important niche. Well into the 1930s, downtown workers did not drive to work, said Dave Danbom, a historian at North Dakota State University. Downtown parking was an issue, then as now, and before the advent of the streetcars, even prominent businessmen walked to work to save parking spaces for customers and salesmen. As the cities began to sprawl, the streetcars added a convenient, reliable way for workers to get downtown.

The streetcars eliminated the need for many people to keep horses and buggies. That freed up land and led to a house-building boom in the area west of Moorhead State University and north of Concordia College.

But the streetcars were not to last. After World War I, inflation increased operating costs, and automobiles lured away riders. The streetcars stopped running in 1937. When the government needed scrap iron for World War II, many cars and tracks were torn apart.

Free wheeling

Bicycles came into vogue locally in the 1890s among young adults who could not afford horses and buggies. According to Peihl, they liberated young farm people, who were previously limited to visiting friends within walking distance. They also freed women from chaperones and influenced dress styles. Manufacturers fitted bicycles with drop frames to accommodate dresses, but women also began wearing divided skirts, bloomers and billowy pants.

Bicycle clubs sprang up, and members began pushing for road improvements. Area streets were mud until at least the mid 1890s, when some were paved with jigsaw-type fittings of cedar blocks, which had a tendency to swell and pop out of place when wet.

Bicycles remained popular until World War I, when automobiles became plentiful and affordable for working people.

Automobility

The automobile entered the picture around 1900, and by 1930 there was one motor vehicle for every four North Dakotans.

In the early 1910s, automobile owners began lobbying for better streets. An early victory was convincing Moorhead to use rectangular blocks of cedar in place of the jigsaw patterns. In 1914, Moorhead’s Fourth Street South was paved with creosote-soaked rectangular cedar blocks laid on a concrete bed. Another part of the street was paved with steel-mesh-reinforced concrete.

Within a week, the Moorhead Weekly News reported a problem with speeding on Fourth Street.

"In any event it is a crime to tear through a residence street at thirty or forty miles an hour as some cars have been running … ," it wrote.

In 1940, Fourth Street was repaved with concrete.

Today, Fargo, Moorhead, West Fargo and Dilworth have a combined 582 miles of streets.

Trucking emerged in the 1920s, but the engines were not strong enough to haul heavy loads. Danbom said many businesses used horses to deliver goods, like coal, lumber and dairy products, until the 1930s.

As the economy shifted from commodities and durable goods to consumer goods, railroads began to lose their shipping dominance to trucks. Railroads have been in continual decline since their heyday in the 1930s, said John Bitzan, an economist with Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute at North Dakota State University.

Since 1980, more than 1,000 miles of railroad have been abandoned in North Dakota, but short-line railroads have increased to operate more than 1,200 miles in the state.

According to Remele, automobiles doomed in-town street railways and railroad passenger service linking Red River Valley towns. And drivers’ demands for better roads led to improvements that enabled trucks to compete with and surpass the railroads for transporting goods.

Highways and byways

States began receiving federal money for highway development in 1916 with the passage of the Federal Aid Road Act. By 1930, North Dakota had 4,300 miles of federal aid highway, 2,800 miles of which were gravel. The longest stretch of continuous pavement was 7 miles.

By the end of World War II, only 20 percent of North Dakota’s highways were paved, but by 1960, that had increased to 80 percent. The great leap forward for automobile travel came in 1956 when Congress expanded federal highway aid, and construction began on the interstate highway system. Danbom said the interstates were a dream of President Dwight Eisenhower, who was inspired by Germany’s Autobahns. They also played a role in Cold War defense strategy.

In 1977, North Dakota became the first state to have its interstate system completed. Fargo, as the only North Dakota city served by two interstates, was assured of future growth.

"The interstates really underscored the picking of winners, as the railroads did," Danbom said.

Taking to the sky

Even before the roads were paved, Fargo-Moorhead residents were looking to the sky. In 1911, eight years after the Wright brothers took to the air at Kitty Hawk, N.C., "Lucky Bob" St. Henry flew what is regarded as North Dakota’s first successful flight, in Fargo.


"Lucky Bob" St. Henry makes what is considered North Dakota's first successful flight in Fargo on June 9, 1911. Hector International Airport

In the early 1920s, as air travel increased, Fargo’s hayfields provided a number of landing strips. But a 1927 visit by Charles Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis - three months after he made the first solo nonstop flight from New York to Paris - appears to have pushed air travel to the forefront of local consciousness. Two weeks after his trip to Fargo, the City Commission appropriated the first funds for improvements at Hector Field.

In 1931, banker Martin Hector, who arrived in Fargo with the Northern Pacific railroad in 1872, presented Fargo with a deed to 160 acres of land, which is part of the present Hector International Airport. The airport’s first hangar was built that year to accommodate Northwest Airways aircraft, which offered service to Chicago.


An undated photograph from Hector International Airport's early years. Hector International Airport

In 1934, the airfare from Fargo to Minneapolis was $11.

Transportation today

Without interstates, Fargo-Moorhead would not have developed the goods and services economy it has today, said Gene Griffin, director of the Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute. Able to haul smaller quantities and travel more flexible routes, trucks have brought "just-in-time" transport technology that frees businesses from storing excess inventory, Bitzan said.

Although railroads remain important - 4,015 miles remain in North Dakota - reliance on trucking and air service continues to increase.

Trucking is the only form of freight transportation for 42 percent of North Dakota’s communities, and more than 66,000 North Dakota-based trucks are involved in commerce. Trucks haul 25 to 30 percent of all agricultural products leaving the state, more than 85 percent of manufactured products entering and leaving the state, and 100 percent of retail goods and supplies received by firms in the state, according to the Transportation Institute.

About 8,000 tons of air freight passes in and out of the state annually, and more than 968 passenger seats are available daily. Hector International Airport alone had nearly 200,000 boarding passengers last year.

As the importance of worldwide markets grows, transportation issues could become even more critical than they were in the past, Griffin said.

"Without good transportation, North Dakota doesn’t exist," he said.

Sources: North Dakota Blue Book: Transportation and Communications draft paper, by Upper Great Plains Transportation Institute; articles from Clay County Historical Society newsletters, by Mark Peihl; Transportation and Communication in the Red River Valley: An Overview, by Larry Remele; Call to Flight: The Story of Fargo’s Hector International Airport, by Nancy Edmonds Hanson and Joyce Eisenbraun.

Diversification helps Nash Finch become one of nation’s top grocery businesses

By Jonathan Knutson
The Forum

Nash Finch Co. helped put the "super" in supermarket.

The company began 114 years ago as a tiny candy and tobacco store in Devils Lake, N.D. Now based in Minneapolis, the company has become the nation’s third largest grocery wholesaler and occupies the 338th slot on the Fortune 500 list with sales of $4.4 billion in 1997.

There’s no mystery why Nash Finch has grown, according to Curt Magnusson of the Grand Forks, N.D.-based Hugo’s supermarket chain, which is supplied by Nash Finch.

"They have wonderful people and a long tradition of providing excellent products," he said. "We’ve been buying from them since 1939. That tells you how we feel about them." His father, Hugo, began Hugo’s in 1939.

Though best known as a wholesaler, Nash Finch is also in involved in retail and produce marketing. Here’s a brief look at each of its three business segments:

• Its wholesale distribution operation supplies products to about 2,250 supermarkets, military bases and other customers in about 30 states. Wholesale distribution accounted for about 80 percent of 1997 sales.

It has a division headquarters and distribution center in Fargo.

• Retail operations consist of 97 stores that the company owns in 13 states, under such names as Sunmart, Econofoods, Food Folks and Family Thrift Center. Retail operations accounted for 19 percent of 1997 sales.

It operates five Sunmart supermarkets in Fargo-Moorhead, with another one being built in West Fargo.

• The produce marketing operation markets fresh fruits and vegetables to wholesalers and retailers worldwide. California-based Nash DeCamp Co., a Nash Finch subsidiary, accounted for 1 percent of Nash Finch sales in 1997.

The company’s diversification was by design.

"You never want to be tied too closely to one geographic area or to one segment (of the grocery industry)," said Al Flaten, who once headed the company, in a 1995 Forum article.

Flaten said the company prizes loyalty, continuity and sense of family. Many employees have worked at Nash Finch for decades.

In the company’s 100th anniversary brochure, published in 1985, Harold Finch Jr., then the company’s president and chief executive officer, wrote:

"During the first 100 years the growth of Nash Finch Co. resulted from hiring young people and giving them the opportunity to grow in a business which was part of the growing food distribution industry."

The Nash Finch story begins with three young men - brothers Fred, Willis and Edgar Nash - who saw opportunity in what was then the Dakota Territory.

In 1885, Fred opened a small candy and tobacco store in Devils Lake. His two brothers later joined him. They lived in the back of the store to reduce overhead.

Soon the brothers bought a store in Park River, N.D., which Edgar ran, and another store in Devils Lake, which Willis ran.

A 1887 fire destroyed one of the Devils Lakes stores. They subsequently sold the second Devils Lake store, as well as the one in Park River, and bought a new one in Grand Forks, N.D.

A month later, fire destroyed their Grand Forks store. But the brothers quickly moved to new, larger quarters in Grand Forks.

In 1889 the Nash brothers began wholesaling fruit. A load of peaches arrived in Grand Forks without a buyer. The brothers borrowed money from a local bank, bought the peaches and sold them in neighboring towns.

With business expanding, the brothers hired a new employee, 14-year-old Harry B. Finch. His first assignment was picking over imported Sicilian lemons, a job nobody else wanted. He earned four silver dollars in his first week: two went to his mother, one for clothing and one into savings.

Eventually Finch would rise to president and chairman of the board of Nash Finch Co. - the first of three generations of Finches to hold the office of president.

In 1896 the company began a wholesaling operation in Crookston, Minn. Finch was put in charge and the company’s name later was changed to Nash Finch.

The company’s wholesaling operations grew steadily. In 1919 its headquarters were moved from Grand Forks to Minneapolis, which was considered a more central and advantageous location.

Sales slumped during the Depression, but rebounded in the 1940s. Annual sales topped $100 million for the first time in 1947.

In 1954 the company branched out from its primary business of food wholesaling into retailing. Supermarkets were beginning to flourish nationwide, and Nash Finch wanted to play a bigger, more direct role in the trend.

So it purchased Food Centers Inc., a chain of 17 supermarkets in Nebraska. Later, Nash Finch began adding Jack & Jill and Piggly Wiggly supermarkets, two familiar names in our area.

The company said it began focusing on "moving merchandise through the retailer’s front door, rather than the old wholesale concept of loading a store with merchandise."

In 1986 Nash Finch supermarkets in Fargo-Moorhead took the Sunmart name.

Thanks in part to adding retailing, Nash Finch has grown steadily for the past 40 years. Annual sales hit $247 million in 1970, $590 million in 1975, $1 billion in 1981, $2.4 billion in 1992 and $4.4 billion in 1997.

Nash Finch has struggled in recent months in the extremely competitive grocery business. The company’s stock price and earnings have been slumped.

The company is responding with a five-year plan to streamline its wholesale business and expand its retail operations.

Wrote Harold Finch Jr. in 1985: "One of the company’s strengths has been its ability to change the nature of its business as changes in the industry and changes in its customers required."

Magnusson, for one, thinks Nash Finch will do just fine.

"They’ve been around for more than 100 years. They know what they’re doing," he said.