Rufus H. Redman

[From Walter Van Brunt’s Duluth and St. Louis County, Minnesota Vols. 1 – 3. The American Historical Society. Chicago: 1922. Available at the Duluth Public Library.]

Rufus H. Redman for thirty years has been actively associated with the wholesale grocery business in Duluth, and is treasurer of Duluth’s premier wholesale grocery house, the Gowan-Lenning-Brown Company.

He was born at Saginaw, Michigan, December 8, 1867, a son of Michael and Jane (Hamilton) Redman. His father was a native of Pennsylvania, spent his active career as a merchant, and died in 1898. The youngest of the family, Rufus H. Redman finished his education in the high school at Saginaw, and his first work was as a reporter on the Saginaw Herald and subsequently on the Saginaw Evening News. While in that work he developed a high degree of skill as a shorthand writer, and when in the spring of 1887 he came to Duluth he was employed for a year as a stenographer by the legal firm of Boggs & McDonald.

Leaving the law office he became a stenographer in the Wells-Stone Mercantile Company, a wholesale and jobbing organization handling both groceries and hardware, one branch of which subsequently became a part of the great Marshall-Wells Company. Mr. Redman remained with this concern for nine years, when the business was sold, and then with other fellow employes he helped establish the Wright-Clarkson Mercantile Company, the chief foundation of the present Gowan-Lenning-Brown Company. The active head of this company was W. S. Brown, who was president of the largest wholesale hardware concern in Iowa, and became president of the Gowan-Lenning-Brown Company upon its organization.

On December 31, 1912, the Wright-Clarkson Mercantile Company and the Gowan-Peyton-Congdon Company were consolidated, at which time Mr.Redman was elected treasurer of the Gowan-Lenning-Brown Company, having previously been a stockholder and official of the Wright-Clarkson Mercantile Company. Mr. Redman has been one of the active officials who have enormously increased the business and prestige of the Gowan- Lenning-Brown Company until its business extends over practically all the great northwest country.

Mr. Redman is a member of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, is a Republican and is a member of the K. K. Club. the Northland Country Club and the Commercial Club. On June 21, 1907, he married Miss Florence Metcalf, of St. Paul.