On this day in 1906, J. M. Arnold became the first person to travel in an automobile from the Twin Cities to Duluth, taking seventeen hour and fifteen minutes to get to the Zenith City from Minneapolis. His route took him, for the most part, through Wisconsin, first heading to St. Paul, on to Stillwater, then down to Hudson, then to New Richmond, Clear Lake, Turtle Lake, Cumberland, Spooner, Gordon, Mingen, Hawthorne, South Range, Itasca, “Old Superior,” West Superior, and finally Duluth. Gordon and passenger H. J. Moore left Minneapolis at 7 a.m. on July 12, driving until dark and spending the night in a farmhouse. They would have reached Duluth a day earlier had they not lost a chain at South Range, where Duluth Auto Club secretary E. J. Filiatrault (the first to take a car over the Aerial Transfer Bridge and, consequently, the first to drive on Minnesota Point) met them and travelled with them the rest of the way to Duluth. Filiatrault said that “if the roads between Minneapolis and South Range were as bad as from there to Duluth, Mr. Arnold had a very successful trip. Along the way Arnold and Moore reported seeing many deer and “other wild animals,” and “encountered a band of seventeen gypsies twelve miles south of Hawthorne.”
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