3M's selling its Minnesota lake resort, ending an era and worrying neighbors

PARK RAPIDS, Minn. — One of the most storied properties in Minnesota's northern lake country is for sale for the first time in nearly 70 years — one very few people have actually seen.

3M late last month said it would sell Wonewok, its resort and conference center that it has used to reward high-performing employees, stage important board meetings and woo customers since 1955.

"If you were invited as an employee to go to Wonewok, that was the top," said Bill Steen, who worked there for 25 years and had two stints as its general manager.

"It was a big deal," Steen said. "You would drive in to 3M Aviation (at St. Paul Downtown Airport), park your car, get on the plane and off you would go to Park Rapids and be brought into this magic world."

The closure comes as the Maplewood-based company is undergoing a significant restructuring aimed at lowering costs. It is shedding 8,500 jobs, roughly 10% of its workforce, and is also preparing to spin off its health care products business, which will shrink its size by 25%.

By selling Wonewok, 3M joins other corporate giants that, in times of financial stress, let go of places that were long part of their culture and identity.

IBM shed its employee country clubs in the 1990s, though it took years for some of them to be redeveloped. GE last year put its conference center in upstate New York on the market, and it still hasn't found a buyer.

Such amenities feel like part of a bygone era. They're hard to justify when a company is cutting jobs or struggling to hit the quarterly numbers.

3M's decision surprised people who live on Mantrap Lake, which Wonewok fronts, and nearby Park Rapids, where 3M personnel and guests routinely arrive on planes or in buses.

"For all of the years I've been giving tours of this lake, I'd always point over to Wonewok and say 'That is 3M. Keep buying Scotch tape,'" said Rich Halvorsen, a process engineer in Plymouth who grew up spending summers at a house on Mantrap Lake that his father built in the early 1950s.

As the current president of the Big Mantrap Lake Association, Halvorsen is the lake's chief historian and promoter. During lunch last week in the nearby unincorporated village of Emmaville, his phone lit up again and again with messages from residents and conservationists seeking news about Wonewok.

The lake is just 1,600 acres of surface water but about 28 miles of shoreline, shaped by several long peninsulas and a handful of islands that confused early explorers. "Men from the logging companies would come in and would think they got around the lake and then they'd hit another bay or another marsh," Halvorsen said.

The area was surveyed and first developed by Thomas Bartow Walker, the Minneapolis lumberman known today chiefly as the benefactor of the Walker Art Center.

Walker gave a swath of land around the lake to the state as a tax payment, helping to form Paul Bunyan State Forest. There's also a large Boy Scout campground on the lake. Wonewok sits on 700 acres of the lake's south side, and it has about seven miles of shoreline. There's relatively little private development on the lake.

"It's special. We'd like to keep that way," Halvorsen said. But he's mindful that lake owners in Minnesota often get worked up about one thing or another. "I know I roll my eyes when a lake association gets in a tizzy," he said.

3M tapped Cresa, a Minneapolis real estate agency that it has used on other transactions, to find a buyer for Wonewok. Standard valuation measures, such as the length of the shoreline or the transaction history of nearby resorts, may not apply for a site as unique as Wonewok, said Jim Vos, a Cresa broker.

"We're eager to address the issue that's before them," Vos said, referring to 3M's desire to sell. "But we also want do it in a way that's responsible to the natural assets and the environment."

The company bought Wonewok six years after the death of its original owner, Fred Nachman, a Chicago industrialist who invented the coiled spring used in mattresses and seats.

Nachman in 1929 completed construction of a 180-foot-long main lodge of pine logs, hand-pegged oak floors and two large stone fireplaces. 3M maintained the main lodge, decorated it with Audubon prints and added more cabins and buildings around it.

Steen joined the staff in 1972 and found some of Nachman's original papers, which showed that someone a century ago thought many houses could be built on Mantrap. "We had a map that showed 50-foot lots just scattered throughout what became the location for the main lodge," Steen said. "He bought the whole development."

Part of 3M's troubles today lie in its long use of environmentally-harmful chemicals in its products, and the litigation it faces to make up for it.

But around Park Rapids, many people say 3M will be missed because of its stewardship of Mantrap Lake, the headwaters for several other lakes near the city.

"They have taken such care of the pristine lakes," said LuAnn Hurd-Lof, retired editor of the Park Rapids Enterprise.

In 30 years leading the paper, she visited Wonewok just a handful of times, including once when its general manager snuck her in to take pictures of its springtime gardens.

"If it all gets divided up, that would be a tragedy," she said.