
Loop Back: The Spectacular Easter Bonnet Fire Of 1925
Just as the city’s oldest hat manufacturer, Bradshaw Brothers, was stocked up and ready for its big spring season, a raging fire ripped through the company’s factory and showrooms at First and Washington Avenues North in the early hours of February 5th, 1925.
About 50,000 Easter bonnets were destroyed, along with scores of other hat-making materials–all of them highly flammable.
The Minneapolis Daily Star had the story on its front page (along with Governor Floyd Olson’s fight to keep some Klansmen in jail, and the Miss Minneapolis pageant’s swimsuit competition).
The Bradshaw Brothers factory reportedly had thousands of spools of ribbon, “enough to reach from Minneapolis to New York,” along with huge stocks of silk, lace, straw braids, artificial fruits and flowers.
Police said there was an explosion soon after the first alarm. One blast blew out the front windows and pushed the state fire marshal across the street and into the Gayety Theater lobby, according to the Daily Star.
The Minneapolis Journal, meanwhile, described a chaotic scene with intense flames and a large crowd of onlookers. “Clanging alarms frightened hundreds of guests in loop hotels and hundreds of persons dressed hastily and crowded into the fire area, blocking streetcar and motor traffic.”
The company, owned by Irish immigrants James and Dawson Bradshaw, was a wholesale manufacturer and distributor of women’s hats.
They quickly scrambled to replace the gutted factory and had a new one built by October of that year.
It still stands today near 1st and Washington, with the Bradshaw name inscribed near the top.
But just five years after rebuilding, the company went out of business. Hat sales plummeted in the Great Depression and Bradshaw Brothers folded in 1930.
Historic photos show a second building that the Bradshaw Brothers also owned, at the corner of 1st and Washington, built in 1881 (below). It only sustained water and smoke damage in the fire.

1925 Photo: Hennepin County Library
I haven’t been able to find out when or why that beautiful building was torn down, but it must have been in the 1930s or early to mid-40s. The photo below was taken in 1946, and there’s a service station to the right, where the building used to be.

1946 photo: Hennepin County Library
Photos from the 1960s – 1980s show a Sinclair gas station and later, a Goodyear tire store with gas pumps on the lot where it used to stand.

1960s photo: Hennepin County Library
In the many years since the various gas stations/tire store left, it has remained a surface parking lot.

1980s photo: Hennepin County Library
Please visit the Historic North Loop section of this website for many more fun photos and articles about our neighborhood’s history.
By Mike Binkley, North Loop volunteer*
(*not an actual historian; I just pulled together information from newspaper archives, public records, online searches and most helpfully, the digital archives at the Hennepin County Library)