“Your new binder was made where?!?” If, during the first half of the 20th century, a farmer in Ohio, Pennsylvania or New York showed his neighbor the shiny new green-and-red grain binder he’d just bought in Minnesota, the incredulous neighbor may well have asked just that question. It wouldn’t, however, have been such a source of astonishment in Minnesota, the eastern Dakotas, northern Iowa or western Wisconsin, where the Minnesota line of farm machinery and twine was common, and everyone knew the stuff was made at the state prison in Stillwater by convict labor.
In the early 1850s, when Minnesota was still a U.S. territory, Congress appropriated $20,000 to build a prison at Stillwater, a town on the west bank of the St. Croix River which, at that point, forms…
