How did the Minnesota Star Tribune get its start?

A burgeoning Minneapolis had just incorporated as a city in 1867 when the first edition of the Minneapolis Tribune rolled off the presses. The new broadsheet began with an apology.

“The lines being down most all day yesterday, we are without the greater part of our dispatches,” the newspaper reported atop its front page. “No one can regret this accident more than ourselves.”

It was (mostly) all up from there. As the company marks a new era as the Minnesota Star Tribune, it was the perfect time to tackle a question about its history. Curious Minnesota superfan Sharon Carlson asked the Strib’s reader-powered reporting project: “How did the Star Tribune get its start?”

Carlson, who lives in Andover, remembers getting angry as a kid because her parents would read the paper “all day long” on Sundays. She now does the same thing, and thinks of the newspaper as “a rare form of education and entertainment.”

There isn’t one origin story, but several. The Minnesota Star Tribune is the result of many newspaper mergers over the decades. Its primary forbears are the Tribune, the Minneapolis Journal (founded in 1878) and the Minneapolis Star (founded in 1920).

From the early days covering a plague of locusts to the “romance” of Minneapolis’ Newspaper Row, these papers bore witness to the biggest events in Minnesota history.

Minneapolis was home to about 7,000 people when the Tribune launched. The streets were unpaved, the sidewalks were wood planks, and there was “no fire department, no sanitary system, no trained nurses, no city water supply,” wrote former editor Bradley L. Morison in “Sunlight on Your Doorstep: The Minneapolis Tribune’s First Hundred Years.”