Pray Manufacturing Co. operated from 1859 to 1886. They also used the name Minneapolis Iron Works.

Beginning in 1859, Otis Pray was a maker of flour-mill machinery. When he built a new factory in 1878, he named it the Minneapolis Iron Works. Shortly after it opened this new factory started making sawmill machinery. Pray's operations quickly expanded, requiring several major additions to the factory during the early 1880s. The Minneapolis sawmill business collapsed in the mid-1880s when the wood ran out. As well, steam-powered machinery made it possible to locate mills away from rivers, and the new inexpensive rail transport increased competition for local makers like Pray. Unable to cope with the changes, Pray Manufacturing went bankrupt in 1886.

Charles Esplin was a machine designer for Pray. Esplin was born in Scotland and moved to Canada in 1846. He studied engineering at McGill University in Montreal, and then established a business erecting grist and saw mills. He moved to Winnipeg in 1878, and, not having achieved the hoped-for success there, he moved to Minneapolis in 1883 and went to work for Pray. After the company's demise in 1886, it appears that he operated the business for a time under the name Charles Esplin. He then moved to Seattle, then Victoria, then back to Winnipeg in 1897.

Information Sources

• From an article in The Minnesota Archaeologist Vol. 49, No. 1-2 1990.
• Patent records show that band sawmills were a specialty.
• The information on Esplin primarily comes from "Engineering expertise and the Canadian exploitation of the technology of the second industrial revolution", by Marvin McInnis of Queen's University. McInnis does not explicitly identify Pray Manufacturing; that information comes from patent records.