Minnesota Boat Club, circa 1884: The Raspberry Island club was the place to be for rowers and elite society guests as the sport became a national craze, along with boxing and horse racing, by 1870. The Corning brothers of Brooklyn established the club as rowing quickly became a spectator sport and a gambling fixture along the Mississippi River in St. Paul. (Charles Alfred Zimmerman/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

Brooklyn-born brothers John and Charles Corning arrived in St. Paul in the late 1860s. John would become president of the Chaska Brick and Tile Co. in Minneapolis, while Charlie started a foundry and a sash and door factory in St. Paul.

But the Corning brothers won their greatest fame rowing and racing ultralight boats on the Mississippi River around St. Paul's Raspberry Island.

The Minnesota Boat Club they helped organize in 1870 is still afloat, celebrating a COVID-delayed 150th anniversary as the state's oldest athletic organization on Sept. 11 with a day of races and events (minnesotaboatclub.org/celebrate-150-years).

Two years before the club's founding, John Wheeler Leavitt Corning showed up in St. Paul packing some fragile cargo. His prized rowing shell, made of shellacked paper, was too breakable to ship by train. So it came to St. Paul from New York "by way of New Orleans by ocean and river vessels, it being a popular belief in those days among rowing men that paper boats would not stand the long trip by rail," according to a 1903 edition of the Razoo, a quarterly boating publication.

John Corning attracted curious onlookers to the Mississippi River banks when he first jumped in and started to row. They "never could see how he 'kept the derned thing right side up,' " the Razoo recalled.

Two years older than his brother, Charlie Corning came to St. Paul in 1869 and became an acclaimed boat racer. The Corning brothers were two of the Minnesota Boat Club's founding 10 members in 1870, with John serving as the club's first secretary-treasurer and Charlie as its second president.

By 1885, when 100 of St. Paul's elite men and women posed for a photo at the club's first boathouse on Raspberry Island, the Minnesota Boat Club included the cream of the young city's crop. Posing with the Cornings in the photo were budding architect Cass Gilbert, who would design the State Capitol and the U.S. Supreme Court building; Lucius P. Ordway, who would rescue and then lead 3M Co.; and William Merriam, who would become Minnesota's 11th governor in 1889.

"While the club became a grand social organization, it didn't start out that way," said Sarah Risser, a Minneapolis rowing buff who has written extensively about local boating history.

The Corning brothers "were young kids in their 20s seeking to gain a foothold in post-Civil War St. Paul," Risser said. "They cobbled together this boat club and it was a gritty start."

A floating boat house at the foot of the Robert Street Bridge served as the Boat Club's first headquarters — "A crude affair," the Razoo said in 1903, "which used to leak and threaten to sink every once in so often and caused the 'boys' many a backache at the pumps to keep their house above the waves of 'Old Mississipp.' "

Construction of a more substantial boathouse on Raspberry Island was completed in 1874. The current Spanish Revival boathouse, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, dates to 1910, according to club president Charlene McEvoy.

"Rowing became a national craze by 1870 right up there with horse racing and boxing as one of the country's most popular sports," Risser said.

Spectators often gambled on the races, lining the river bluffs and the Wabasha Street Bridge to cheer as racers — in single, double and four-man boats — rowed upstream for a mile, turned 180 degrees around a stake and sped back downstream to the boathouse.

"Charles Corning was the real star," often competing nationally, according to Risser. His crew once out-rowed a fabled London team in Philadelphia in 1876, according to Risser.

A photo of Charles Corning in the Minnesota Historical Society archives calls him the "Father of the Minnesota Boat Club and Pioneer of Amateur Rowing in the Northwest." John gets most of the credit as the first rower in the Twin Cities, but many of those stories came from his son Leavitt, who published the Razoo.

With popular regattas on July 4th and competitions against rowers from Minneapolis, Winnipeg, Chicago and Milwaukee at Devil's Lake, Wis., and other venues, the Minnesota Boat Club's prominence grew.

But as other sports such as tennis and golf grew more popular in the late 1800s, the Boat Club fleet fell into disrepair. Financial problems forced it to cut ties with its nationally respected coach, an ex-professional racer named John A. Kennedy.

In the 1990s, the club's boathouse was nearly condemned and razed, its windows busted and bird droppings littering the ballroom floor where city luminaries once danced. A $1 million renovation led by the city and private partners in 2004 sparked a grand reopening.

John Corning died 100 years ago at 76, outlasting Charlie by 33 years. They're buried at St. Paul's Oakland Cemetery. McEvoy said the club still owns a trophy named after the Corning brothers.

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.