Ramsey County History – Winter 2002: “Crises and Panics and Mergers and Failures: St. Paul’s Struggling Banks and How They Survived Their First 75 Years”

Crises and Panics and Mergers and Failures:
St. Paul’s Struggling Banks and How They Survived Their First 75 Years
Author: G. Richard Slade

This article examines some of the banking history of St. Paul with a close look at how several businesses successfully dealt with tough economic times. Locally, banking began with an 1853 bank that received a national charter as the First National Bank of St. Paul in the 1860s. James J. Hill tried to buy this bank, but he was rebuffed; so he organized the Second National Bank. It would stay in the Hill family after his death. There was also the National German-American Bank that was later merged into the Merchants National Bank. Then. the US government created the Federal Reserve System in 1913, with its twelve regional institutions. Though not well-known, there was a great wave of bank failures in the 1920s before the Crash of 1929. In response, Minnesota bankers developed two bank holding companies called the “Minnesota Twins’—the Northwest Bancorporation and the First Bank Stock Group. Their purpose was to create networks of Minnesota banks to fence out national competition. Finally, in 1929, the First National and Merchants National banks were combined. One focus of this article is the banks that eventually were merged into the First National Bank of St. Paul.
PDF of Slade article