Mayo Clinic and Rochester have a symbiotic relationship

Jan. 26—ROCHESTER — In the tale of the city and the clinic, the growth of Rochester and Mayo Clinic is intertwined so closely that it is hard to separate.

"Many people will say that they are surprised that Mayo Clinic could flourish in a place like Rochester. My response is that Mayo Clinic thrives not in spite of, but rather because of Rochester," said Matthew Dacy, the director of Mayo Clinic's Heritage Hall.

From his perspective as a longtime resident and Mayo Clinic's unofficial historian, Dacy sees the impact of the Mayo family from the opening of Dr. William Worrall Mayo's medical office on Jan. 27, 1864, as a fuel for the development engine of the city of Rochester.

"It's quite symbiotic," he said. "The location drove the clinic's growth and the clinic's growth enhanced the location."

While Mayo Clinic had been a community leader for much of Rochester's history, IBM was the top employer for many years. IBM opened its Rochester operations in 1956 with 174 employees.

The Armonk, New York-based company was Rochester's top employer for much of the late 1950s and early 1960s. In 1966, Mayo Clinic tied it, when each employed 3,600 workers. Mayo pulled ahead in 1967 with 3,850 employees compared to IBM's 3,800.

A casual tour of Rochester's downtown shows Mayo Clinic's mark on the city with the iconic Plummer (built in 1928) and Mayo (built in 1955) buildings as well as the recent additions of the Gonda (built in 2001) and Kellen (built in 2023) buildings.

The Mayo name crops up everywhere in Rochester from Mayo High School to the sprawling Mayo Civic Center.

However, mapping out the relationship between the city and the clinic reveals that the transportation links to Rochester that brought the elder Dr. Mayo here later become the lifeblood of Mayo Clinic bringing patients here via rail, road and eventually air.

"This is a classic planes, trains and automobiles story," said Dacy.

Rochester's early access to train travel brought Dr. W. W. Mayo to the young city as an examining surgeon of the draft enrollment board during the Civil War. The trains would take the new recruits to the East Coast.

In 1864, Rochester became a stop on the Winona & St. Peter Railroad. The line was sold to the Chicago & Northwestern Transportation Co. in 1867.

In the 1870s, Dr. W. W. Mayo realized that a city's very existence depended on the reliable movement of goods and services. He led the fight to expand the train service to transport locally grown wheat to flour mills based in cities throughout the Midwest.

Eventually, the main cargo on the trains changed from goods to people looking for healing.

Once the early Mayo Clinic developed a reputation for quality and innovation — it was an early adopter of antiseptic practices to avoid infection — patients were traveling farther and farther to reach Rochester for treatment.

In those days, before super highways and frequent air travel, Rochester was not an easy place to reach other than by rail.

"The railroad was essential to Mayo's growth and development," Dacy said. "People would travel long distances in frail health to get here to Mayo. Chicago was a major rail hub. People would travel from their homes to Chicago and then board the train to Rochester."

From 1930 to 1963, a specially designed patient car dubbed the "Joseph Lister" in honor of Dr. Joseph Lister, who introduced antiseptic practices into medicine, rolled in and out of Rochester as part of the Chicago and Northwestern "Rochester 400" passenger train.

Patients being transported overnight from Chicago to Rochester on the "Lister" rail car needed beds to be made comfortable on the journey.

"This Pullman car was a Mayo One helicopter on wheels," said Dacy. "There was a need and technology evolved to meet that need."

The specially made train car has been refurbished and is on display in the National Railroad Museum in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Of course, the rails weren't the only way that patients were arriving in Rochester.

A national "Good Roads" movement, which was started by bicyclists in 1880, pushed for better roads going from muddy dirt tracks to early paved highways.

"The Mayos believed that you have to engage with the community to be a good citizen and a contributor to the larger, commonweal of the society. It was a natural extension of that, which got involved with the Good Roads campaign in the early 1900s," said Dacy.

The Mayos gave speeches to promote the Good Roads campaign to pave the roads for farmers to transport their crops and so patients and staff could travel into and out of the city.

Those early efforts of turning muddy paths into roads led to the construction of U.S. Highway 52 as an expressway from Rochester to St. Paul in the 1960s.

From 2003 to 2006, the state launched the first-of-its-kind design-build, best-value project dubbed ROC52 to upgrade the Rochester section of Highway 52. The 11.8-mile project ran from the junction of 85th Street Northwest to south of the junction of U.S. Highway 63, aka Broadway.

That means the Minnesota Department of Transportation awarded the project to a private contractor, Zumbro River Constructors, not only based on price, but also on how well, how creatively and how quickly the contractor said it could do the work.

It cost $232 million. However, the then-novel rapid approach to the construction saved an estimated $30 million in inflationary costs and millions more by avoiding future right-of-way acquisitions.

"It was a very big deal," remembered Minnesota Department of Transportation's Greg Paulson, who was district engineer at the time. "The EIS (Environmental Impact Statement) was done and some of the preliminary engineering was done, so you knew the footprint of what you're going to do. Then you hand it over to the contractor. A team of contractors and engineers are developing the final plans while they start construction, so it really does speed up that timeline. It gives the contractor a lot more direct input into how the project's designed. It really gives them a way to tailor the project to really fit them."

One major aspect of the project developed on the fly as the plan evolved to include expanding the four-lane highway to six lanes.

"We were seeing the traffic growth numbers and that the traffic projections were going up. If you're gonna do it (expand to six lanes), the time to do it is when you're doing a total reconstruction. It's kind of one of those things," said Paulson. "I think it was really a good value."

While IBM was more active during that time than it is now, the core driver of the project was Mayo Clinic as the top employer for the area and the primary reason people visit Rochester. That means Mayo Clinic was deeply involved with the ROC52 project.

"Obviously, Mayo is an engine of growth in the community. It's an extremely important asset to the community and to the state," said Paulson. "We worked very closely with Mayo. They were great to work with as we provided the information about what was going on in the project in weekly updates, so they could keep their employees and patients informed about what was going on with the project."

Mayo Clinic was also a prime driver in bringing air travel to Rochester. There was a landing field in Rochester as early as 1912.

In 1928, Mayo Foundation dedicated 285 acres as Lobb Field. Northwest Airways soon began flying Ford Trimotor airplanes to Rochester from its hub in St. Paul. Rochester was one of Northwest's first destinations.

"There's actually a carving of a Ford Trimotor airplane on an exterior wall of the Plummer Building. That was the first plane that landed at the airport," Dacy pointed out. "So you can say that Mayo Clinic's commitment to air travel is literally carved in stone."

During World War II, the Army Air Corps conducted training at the airport. The Fontana School of Aeronautics provided contract glider training to the U.S. Army Air Forces between 1942 and 1944, using primarily C-47 Skytrains and Waco CG-4 unpowered gliders.

Mayo Clinic researchers helped develop key aviation gear for the U.S. military. One was the A-14 mask, a device that provided the pilot with supplemental oxygen at oxygen-depriving altitudes. The other was the famous G suit.

At 2 Gs, a pilot feels twice his body weight pushing him against his seat. At 3 Gs, he feels triple the weight. As G-forces rise, it becomes harder for the heart to pump blood to the head, resulting in a lack of oxygen to the brain and loss of consciousness.

At Mayo Clinic, a

centrifuge was built to measure and observe these forces on the human body, which led to the creation of a G suit for pilots.

That was an early example of Mayo Clinic working with the Department of Defense, which is a relationship that continues today.

Eventually, a new airport — the Rochester International Airport — replaced the original airfield. Mayo Clinic gifted the property to the city of Rochester. However, Mayo Clinic manages it through its Rochester Airport Co. firm.

Today's airport includes a U.S. Customs office and can handle large commercial and private planes. Many international patients, particularly from the Middle East and Europe, use large personal planes to travel to Rochester for treatment at Mayo Clinic.

Looking to the future, Mayo Clinic leaders have always considered an active airport to be crucial to the clinic's future. In July 1939, Dr. William J. Mayo was dying of stomach cancer. He wrote a note about what the clinic needed to be successful and expanding the airport was the first item.

"Literally on his deathbed, one of the last commands he issued was not directly about the clinic or the laboratories, as important as they were. He wrote 'Expand the airport.' That's almost counterintuitive. The CEO is dying and the last thing he says is 'Expand the airport,' because he knew that that was the engine of growth," said Dacy.

Looking back through Mayo Clinic's history, its growth has always been tied closely to the growth of Rochester. The Destination Medical Center campaign is a good example of that as was the construction of the now-iconic Gonda Building in 2001.

"Mayo will continue to invest and grow in Rochester. And that's just fundamental. It is a cycle. It has been about 20 years since the Gonda Building. You can set your watch by it. Here we are again with another major expansion (the $5 billion Mayo Clinic Bold. Forward. Unbound project)," said Dacy. "At the fundamental level, it's a pattern of commitment that you're seeing lived out over and over again."