Winona Hudson Corporation history

In the spring of 1902 the store was known as the Goodfellow Dry Goods store; it was then named the Dayton Dry Goods store, then simply the Dayton Company, the forerunner of Dayton Hudson Corporation.

In 1918 the Dayton Foundation had been established with $1 million.

Dayton's son David had died in 1923 at age 43, and George turned more and more of the company business over to another son, Nelson.

Nelson Dayton took over the presidency of the Dayton Company in 1938, when it was already a $14 million business, and saw it grow to a $50 million enterprise.

Since 1946, five percent of the Dayton Company's taxable income was donated to the foundation, which continued to be the case after the merger.

Until Nelson Dayton's death in 1950, the company was run along the strict moral lines of his father, its founder.

In 1954 the J.L. Hudson Company, which would eventually merge with Dayton's, opened the world's largest shopping mall in suburban Detroit.

In 1967 the company, by then known as Dayton Corporation, made its first public stock offering.

Also in 1968 the company acquired department stores in Oregon and Arizona.

Company revenues surpassed $1 billion in 1971.

In the summer of 1973, Don Peterson bought the company with two partners.

The foundation inspired the Minneapolis Chamber of Commerce in 1976 to establish the Minneapolis 5% Club, which eventually included 23 companies, each donating five percent of their respective taxable incomes to charities.

That year Dayton Hudson became the seventh-largest general merchandise retailer in the United States, its revenues topping $3 billion in 1979.

Dayton Hudson bought Ayr-Way, an Indianapolis-based chain of 50 discount stores, in 1980, and converted those units to Target stores.

A period of rapid growth and expansion followed in 1992.

In 1994 Target executive Robert J. Ulrich was named chairman and chief executive officer of Dayton Hudson.

Along with expanding its traditional department stores along the East Coast, six new SuperTargets were planned for 1996 alone.

He took on the day-to-day operation of the Fill Plant and overseeing the design and building of a new industrial gas filling facility, which was completed in Winona in 2004.