Bio of PETERSON, S. J. (b.1871), Hennepin Co., MN
=========================================================================
USGENWEB NOTICE: In keeping with our policy of providing free information
on the Internet, material may be freely used by non-commercial entities,
as long as this message remains on all copied material, AND permission is
obtained from the contributor of the file.
These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit or
presentation by other organizations. Persons or organizations desiring to
use this material for non-commercial purposes, MUST obtain the written
consent of the contributor, OR the legal representative of the submitter,
and contact the listed USGenWeb archivist with proof of this consent.

If you have found this file through a source other than the MNArchives 
Table Of Contents you can find other Minnesota related Archives at:
http://www.usgwarchives.net/mn/mnfiles.htm
Please note the county and type of file at the top of this page to find 
the submitter information or other files for this county.
FileFormat by Terri--MNArchives

Made available to The USGenWeb Archives by: Laura Pruden
Submitted: June 2003
=========================================================================
Copyright.  All rights reserved.
http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm
========================================================
EXTRACTED FROM: History of Minneapolis, Gateway to the Northwest; 
Chicago-Minneapolis, The S J Clarke Publishing Co, 1923; Edited by: Rev. 
Marion Daniel Shutter, D.D., LL.D.; Volume I - Shutter (Historical); 
volume II - Biographical; volume III - Biographical
========================================================

Vol III, pg 102-105
S. J. PETERSON
For more than thirty years S. J. Peterson has been engaged in the contracting
business in Minneapolis and now enjoys the unique distinction of being the
oldest contractor engaged in his line of work in the city. The years have
brought with them success. Judged either by the accumulation of material
possessions or the performance of difficult construction feats with skill and
thoroughness, Mr. Peter-son's career has been one of noteworthy achievement.
S. J. Peterson came to the United States a poor boy, whose sole assets were
virtue and capacity. Born in Sweden, on the 18th of April, 1871, he obtained an
elementary education in his native land, reaching a point corresponding to our
first year of high school by the time he was fourteen. In 1886 he came to
America and went directly to Dubuque, Iowa, where he stayed for six months. He
then went to St. Paul, where he lived for a year before moving to Minneapolis,
which became his permanent home. The lad began to earn his own way in the world
by working on a railroad, doing construction work. In the winter, when the bad
weather put an end to railroad construction he went into the woods to work in
the lumber camps. By carefully saving his slender earnings the young man was
able to buy a team of horses the year he was nineteen. Thus provided with a bit
of working capital he was able to increase his income, until in 1892 he ventured
into business on his own account. S. J. Peterson was just twenty-one years old
when he embarked in this enterprise and he had eight head of horses which he had
bought with the proceeds of his own hard toll. Beginning as a road contractor,
excavator and dealer in sand and gravel in a small way, his business has
steadily grown until it is one of the most important of its kind in the Twin
cities. Dur­ing the busy season he employs as many as five hundred men and never
has less than one hundred on his force, and this large number in spite of the
fact that the use of the steam shovel and trucks have greatly reduced the amount
of man power required to perform a given piece of work. Mr. Peterson was even
able to keep his organization going in the stagnation in building enterprises
during the World war, when all of his competitors in the city were forced to
close down.
Mr. Peterson married Miss Anna C. Johnson and they have one daughter, Ruth
Johanna Peterson, now a student in West high school. Mr. Peterson is essentially
a business man and confines the greater part of his energies and interests to
commercial and industrial affairs. He is a member of the Civic & Commerce
Association, the Calhoun Commercial Club and the Lake Street Commercial
Com­mission, all organizations devoted to the promotion of the city's
development as a trade and industrial center. He is a republican in his
political views and a member of Zion Lutheran church, of which he has been a
trustee for fifteen years. Mr. Peterson belongs to the Automobile Club, the Odin
Club and a number .of smaller clubs composed of more intimate groups of friends
in whose pleasant social gatherings this busy man of affairs enjoys an
occasional hour or two of diversion and relaxation from the strain of commercial
life.