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GRANITE FALLS — 3M’s newly published biography of famed philanthropist and entrepreneur Archie Bush is a true discovery, thanks to Carol Heene’s passion for history.
It’s bloodline. For decades, the Heene family has preserved a country school on their land in Wang Township in western Renville County to tell the story of early rural education.
This helps explain why, in 2019, Heene was shuffling through historical documents held by the Granite Falls Historical Society at the Volstead House in Granite Falls.
While researching a topic that interested her, she happened to come across a book waiting to be published.
She found a draft of a 12-chapter biography of Archie Bush, founder of the Bush Foundation, written by Carl Narvestad, a native of Renville Country.
Mr. Bush worked with William McKnight to build 3M, originally known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, into an international company. He founded the Bush Foundation in his 1953 year. He has donated millions of dollars to the region and is particularly known for his Bush Fellowship program, which supports leaders.
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Bush, like Narvestad, grew up in Wang Township, Renville County. Narvestad attended school with Bush’s nieces. “He had knowledge that would have been lost forever if he hadn’t put it in writing,” Heene said in a presentation to Granite Falls Kiwanis on Nov. 2, 2023.
Narvestad died in 2003 at the age of 88. So Heen would have to wait at least 16 years before he picked up his manuscript to share his work.
Archie Bush: From the Plains to Philanthropy (Nordin Press), written by Karl Narvestad and edited by Carol Heene, tells the story of Archie Bush and 3M, which begins in Norway. It takes us to the western frontier of North Dakota. Archie Bush’s mother had immigrated to the United States from Valdres, Norway, in 1866.
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His mother Emma married a pharmacist. They were stationed at a military fort in western North Dakota, which Heene described as “really tough country.” They likely watched as Lt. Col. George Custer led his troops back west in 1876, Heene said.
Emma’s first husband died in 1880, and for what appears to be mysterious reasons, Emma purchased a farm in Wang Township, Renville County, in 1882. Heene said it was unusual for women to own farmland. She can only guess that Emma took her pension when her first husband died and she invested it in her land.
It is very likely that her choice of farmland in Wang township was due to the fact that many of its settlers were from Valdres, Norway.
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In 1883, Emma married the man who became Archie Bush’s father. Tom Bush was a cowboy from Texas, and the newlyweds lived in Texas before settling on land they had purchased in Wang Township. One can only speculate how she persuaded Texas cowboys to move to the prairies of western Minnesota to farm and live among Norwegian-speaking settlers, Heene said.
Archibald Granville Bush was born on March 5, 1887, and his family moved for a time so he and his brother could attend school in Granite Falls.
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Archie Bush’s rise to a leadership role at 3M and founding a philanthropic organization seems as unlikely as anything that came before it.
Archie Bush honed his entrepreneurial skills as a boy trapping muskrats in the swamps near his family’s farm. He loved farming, but his hay fever led him to Duluth, where the air was cleaner.
He took a job in 1909 at a small sandpaper company known as Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing for a weekly wage of $11.55. Heene explained that the company is a really small company and is really struggling at the moment.
It was founded on the belief that it possessed the nation’s only deposit of abrasive ore, known as the hardwood. The newly discovered deposit, which the company had been looking forward to, turned out to be a low-grade anorthosite unsuitable for use as an abrasive, Narvestad wrote.
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Many other challenges followed, but as is well known, the company prospered thanks to innovation and active consideration of the wishes and needs of its customers. Much of the actual growth occurred during the Great Depression.
Narvestad talks about how Busch and McKnight built the company into the world leader we know today. He also devotes a significant portion of his book to the unique relationship between Archie Bush and his hometown of Granite Falls.
President Bush gifted the district with innovative technology from 3M, making it the first district to install overhead projectors for classrooms and recording equipment for music programming.
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Then-Superintendent Milton Lindback developed a relationship with Archie Bush and helped transform the small river community.
Mr. Busch helped bring two metropolitan-based manufacturing businesses to Granite Falls. He bought them and placed them in a ready-made industrial park. He was also instrumental in finding a location in the area that is now the campus of Minnesota West Technical and Community College.
Heene said it’s hard to imagine anyone better able to tell the story of Archie Bush and his love for his hometown than Karl Narvestad.
Never mind that Narvestad made a living as a farmer in Wang Township, even though he was crippled by polio. “He could never put away his typewriter,” Heene said.
He co-authored the 900-page History of Yellow Medicine County and published 14 other books.
The county history book was a project with his late wife, Amy Narvestad. Amy Narvestad ran the Sacred Heart newspaper for many years and shared her husband’s talent and passion for both writing and history.
Thanks to Heene, the book concludes with an epilogue by the late mayor, David Smigulski, explaining the changes Bush made possible.
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Now that Karl Narvestad’s final manuscript is finally available, Heene is intent on telling the story of another historical figure.
What she calls the Kathleen Jordan Project celebrates the life of a woman who grew up in Algeria as the daughter of French missionaries and came to Minnesota to work as a doctor. Kathleen Jordan, along with her husband Lewis, oversaw a tuberculosis sanitarium and is credited with saving countless lives with her successful anti-TB campaign.
stay tuned.
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