What the Corner Has Seen

Someone has stood at the corner of 3rd Avenue West and Superior Street and told Duluth men the truth about what fits since 1891.

That is the plain fact underneath everything else in this store's history. The name above the door has changed more than once. The stock on the floor has turned over more times than anyone bothered to count. But the corner has held, and the job has not changed: measure the man in front of you honestly, and sell him only what actually serves him. That's the whole job, really.

This is the first issue of the Heritage Journal, and we wanted to start here, with the plain history, before we write about fit or fabric or anything else. You should know what this place is before you read anything else it has to say.

Five Names, One Corner

In 1891, Matthew Burrow opened Great Eastern Clothing at this corner, the first major tenant in a new five-story building of iron, pressed brick, and brown sandstone. The corner has been a clothing store every year since.

In 1905, Burrow sold the store, and for the first time in this corner's history, the name changed. William Billstein, who had been running a Columbia Clothing Company across the harbor in Superior, Wisconsin, bought Great Eastern and brought the Columbia name to Duluth. That is the year we count from, not because nothing happened here before it, but because that is when the name we still carry arrived at this address.

Since 1905, the Columbia name has belonged to four ownership groups: Billstein, then Bradley starting in 1936, then Barbo starting in 1953, then Dickinson starting in 2025. Walter Soneson was among the principals of that Bradley-era ownership. Count Burrow's years running Great Eastern before that, and five different proprietors have kept a clothing business standing at this one corner for 135 years. Five owners. One corner.

What the Barbos Built

Edward Barbo Sr. bought the store in 1953 from the estate of the late Davis Bradley. He had come up in shoes, not suits: manager of the shoe department at the Glass Block in 1919, the Lester Shoe Store in Superior in 1925, the Nunn-Bush department at McGregor and Soderstrom in 1948. By the time he owned Columbia Clothing outright, he had spent more than three decades learning what it means to fit a person correctly, one pair of shoes at a time. And that's not nothing.

The Barbo family put their own name on the store to keep customers from confusing it with the Columbia Sportswear brand of outdoor apparel. Barbo Sr. later handed the store to his son, Edward Barbo Jr., who had started on the floor in 1969 and took it over in 1974. Ed Jr.'s era brought The Underground, a shop built into the store's basement for a younger generation of buyers who wanted something different from what their fathers wore. Meet the customer you actually have, not the one you used to have. That instinct is one we still work from.

The Brothers From Park Rapids

In March of 2025, Kyle and Jeff Dickinson, brothers from Park Rapids with no prior experience in clothing retail, bought the business. That last part is worth sitting with. Every owner before us came up inside this trade. We didn't. Not even close. We spent our first months here listening more than talking, learning what the corner already knew before we tried to add anything to it.

What we found was a store that had been doing the essential thing right for well over a century, and a customer base that had trusted it to keep doing so. Our job was never to reinvent Columbia. It was to be the next handoff in a line of people who took this seriously enough to keep it going.

The Proof Is in the Details

A store's real history shows up less in the stories it tells and more in the things you can still touch. There is a Diebold safe in this building that came with the property and still opens, still works, the same as it did decades ago. We kept it. It is not decoration. It is evidence that the people who built this place built it to last, and that the people who have run it since have known better than to throw away something that still works.

The same instinct governs how we sell shoes and how we handle a garment that needs work. Allen Edmonds still makes its dress shoes in Port Washington, Wisconsin, and still resoles what it made instead of asking you to replace it. When a garment on our floor needs alteration, we measure and pin it ourselves, in the shop, and manage the work through longtime tailor partners on our own timeline, the way this store has handled tailoring for generations. None of this is a selling point we invented. It is just how the work has always been done here.

Still Counting

This is the store's 121st year under the Columbia name. We say that number often, and we want to be honest about what it does and does not mean. It does not mean we know more about menswear than anyone else in Duluth. It means we have been paying attention, at this one corner, longer than almost any business in this city. And the men who have walked through this door across five proprietorships and thirteen and a half decades have taught this store something that cannot be learned any other way.

The Heritage Journal is where we plan to write down what that teaches us. Some of it will be about fit and fabric. Some of it, like this first issue, will just be about the corner itself, and the people who have stood behind its counter since 1891. For the fuller version of this history, visit our heritage page.

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The Columbia of Duluth is at 303 West Superior Street. We have been here since 1905, and the corner longer than that. Come see us, or book a visit.