The decision is made in the room
There is no parent company and no regional office. When you ask for a loan, the people weighing it are the people who own the bank, and they live where you live.
Manchester 1906 · Albert Lea 1946 · Emmons 1968 · Alden 2016
The whole record.
Chartered in 1906. On Bridge Avenue since 1946. Owned by the people who work here since 2006.
Most banks tell you about their values. We would rather show you the dates, because the dates are checkable and values are not.
What follows is the actual sequence: who chartered this bank, who bought it, when it moved, when it grew, and the year the staff took ownership of it. Some of it is small. A creamery used to stand where the Albert Lea lobby is now. We think that counts too.
Every date we have
1906 to 2026.
- 1906 The charter is established in Manchester, Minnesota, under the name Manchester State Bank.
- 1908 Two miles away, the Bridge Avenue site begins its own record. Over the following decades it holds the Northwestern Tanning Company, the Bagan and Company Creamery Store, Dahl’s Grocery and the Northside State Bank.
- 1945 The bank is sold to two brothers, Art and Ed Lund.
- 1946 The Lunds move the bank to the growing north side of Albert Lea, onto Bridge Avenue. That side of town had gone fourteen years without a bank of its own. It has not been without one since.
- 1968 A second location is acquired in Emmons, on Main Street.
- 1976 An auto bank is added in Albert Lea.
- 1981 A larger building goes up on the same site, with three times the ground floor of the one it replaced. The grand opening runs across two days that June.
- 2001 The bank turns ninety five. It is marked with entertainment and lunch, put on for the whole town.
- 2006 The charter turns one hundred, in the same year Albert Lea turns one hundred and fifty. And in that year the bank becomes employee owned. At the time there is one other employee owned bank in Minnesota and two others in the whole country. The year it became ours
- 2016 Alden is acquired, making three towns.
- 2026 One hundred and twenty years of the charter. Twenty years of employee ownership.
437 Bridge Avenue
A tannery. A creamery. A grocery. A bank.
Before it was ours, this corner was the Northwestern Tanning Company, then the Bagan and Company Creamery Store, then Dahl’s Grocery, then the Northside State Bank. Albert Lea has been doing business on this spot since 1908. We are the current tenants of a long habit.
Twenty years an owner group
Bank with the people who own it.
Personal, business, farm. Open an account, start an application, or just come in and ask us something.