February 25, 1830: Birth of Duluth pioneer Roger Munger

On this day in 1830, Duluth pioneer Roger S. Munger was born in North Madison, Connecticut. He was raised in New Haven and graduated Yale when he was 21, afterwards managing a “large music store” before heading to Iowa. In 1857 he moved to St. Paul, where he and his brothers R. C. and William performed as the “Munger Brothers Orchestra.” While in St. Paul Munger drove the organization and funding of the St. Paul Grand Opera House on Wabasha Avenue between Third and Fourth Streets. In 1869 he and his wife Olive moved to the Zenith City, eventually building a grand home along Mesaba Avenue. In Duluth he went into the lumber business with R. A. Gray and later the grain storage business, partnering with Clinton Markell and Col. C. H. Graves in a firm that would eventually be named the Lake Superior Elevator Company. Munger had a hand in building Duluth’s first flour mill, first coal dock, first sawmill, first opera house, and served on the first Board of Trade, first school board, first city council, and first park board. He would later become president of Duluth’s Imperial Flour Mill and the Duluth Iron & Steel Company. Munger also took charge of a task that changed Duluth forever, the 1870–1871 digging of the Duluth Ship Canal. Although Munger himself hired the W. W. Williams & Co. and their dredging tug Ishpeming in September, 1870, years later he would perpetuate the false legend that Duluth citizens dug the canal by hand. Munger died in 1914.

Roger Munger. (Image: Duluth Public Library)