Louis F. Menage

Louis Francois Menage (August 3, 1850 – March 18, 1924) was a real estate speculator and prominent figure in early Minneapolis, Minnesota history.

Characterized as a "tycoon"[1] and "robber baron,"[2] Menage earned a fortune developing land on the city's borders into residential housing and financing the mortgages to enable people to buy his properties.

While Menage was in high school, his father died of tuberculosis, leaving Louis and his brother to take over the family's confectionery business.

In 1871, a doctor diagnosed Menage with "weak lungs" and suggested he move west to avoid falling ill with tuberculosis himself.

He also worked with Thomas Lowry, head of the city's streetcar system, to ensure that new lines were built to serve the outlying areas he was developing.

[4] Menage ran into legal trouble with the purchase of a large plot of land south of Minneapolis known as "Lyndale Farm."

Remington (joined later by a partner, Robert Innes) advanced King a sum of money in exchange for managing the land and seeing that it was developed or sold for a fair price.

While at the time Menage maintained he was not burdened by the judgment, he later recalled the protracted legal battle and subsequent loss "threatened bankruptcy and ruin.

[3][4] While Minneapolis was the center of Menage's empire, he also owned land and property elsewhere in the Midwest and western states including Bozeman, Montana,[6] Galveston, Texas, Gary, Indiana, and Madison, Wisconsin.

He donated funds toward the construction of the first Minneapolis Public Library building, provided a temporary home for the Ripley Memorial Hospital, and also sponsored a new bell in the First Baptist Church which he attended.

The expedition, led primarily by Dean Conant Worcester and Frank Swift Bourns, collected thousands of specimens of birds and animals; some, such as the Philippine slow loris (Nycticebus menagensis) and the Sulu bleeding-heart (Gallicolumba menagei), were named in honor of Menage.

[7] In the early 1890s, Menage had begun to purchase land near Puget Sound in Washington, accumulating several thousand acres which he planned to develop into an iron mine, smelter and steel mill, along with housing for the workers.

Many of the deeds were held by random names taken from the Minneapolis and Saint Paul telephone books, the properties themselves were unimproved, and the payments to investors were being made out of the bank's funds.

[1][4] Menage spent the rest of his life living in New Jersey and working in real estate in the New York City area.