THIS YEAR TRUENORTH STEEL IS CELEBRATING ITS 75TH ANNIVERSARY

being in the steel fabricating and manufacturing business. To honor the company’s anniversary, TrueNorth Steel has brought forward some of the history including more about its founder, Ole Rommesmo Sr.

Ole Sr. was an immigrant from Norway who after he landed in this country settled in northern Minnesota. His first job was working as a lumberjack for a timber company. Starting wage was a little over a dollar a day and his board and room expense was a dollar a day, so to quote Ole Sr., “I wasn’t getting too far ahead. “

Knowing a bigger city would potentially offer more opportunity, he moved to Minneapolis and got a job at a steel tank plant as a general laborer; there he learned the trade of welding from his Forman. Ole Sr. believed if you learned a trade, any trade, you could move anywhere and get a job. With that belief, he eventually took his welding skills to Fargo, North Dakota, and was hired as a welder for the Fargo Foundry Company, currently Mid America Steel.

After working for the Fargo Foundry Company, Ole Sr. attempted to break out on his own. He found himself not succeeding but never kept trying. He ended up going broke four times before World War II. At the onset of the war, Ole Sr.’s leadership and steel working ability was recognized by the United States government. In Lieu of serving his country in combat, Ole Sr. was deployed by the United States military to northern Canada. There he worked as a welder/construction foreman on an airbase, which the United States and

Canada were jointly constructing. He worked there until right before the end of World War II.

Upon his return to Fargo, Ole Sr. attempted for a fifth time to start his own steel business, Fargo Tank Company in 1945. He initially started manufacturing steel storage tanks for the oil and agricultural industries. With only five employees, that original team manufactured tanks in the evening and sold and delivered tanks during the day. He would always say “If hard work were to kill a man I should’ve been dead years ago.”

Ole Sr. was known for his “dynamic go-go” personality. He seemed to carry a strong sense of blue-collar pride and used his values and vision to create jobs and build his business as strong as steel.

With hard work and determination, he found success in the steel tank business which he passed along to his son, Ole Jr. upon his death in 1990. Such achievement allowed this father son business to expand into the corrugated metal pipe, structural steel, and bridge industries. With the attainment of broadening the product lines, the company expanded and established Huron Culvert and Tank (Huron, SD),

Mandan Steel (Mandan, ND), Johnston Fargo Culvert (Fargo, ND), Dakota Steel (Rapid City, SD), Precision Stair and Steel (Mandan, ND), and Roscoe Steel and Culvert (Billings & Missoula, MT; Casper, WY) over the years. The businesses were known by their names individually.

Ole Rommesmo, Jr. now leads the business, and in 2011, Ole Jr. integrated these individual steel businesses into a single organization, forming TrueNorth Steel. TrueNorth Steel carries the company’s more than seven decades of history into the future – continuing to deliver on the values of integrity, humility, focus, commitment and knowledge on which Ole Sr. founded the business and continuing to serve its customers with reliable steel products they can count on.

AS EMPLOYEES WERE SENT HOME TO WORK DURING THE PANDEMIC, ONE TOPIC THAT HAS ARISEN IS PROTECTING COMPANY AND PERSONAL DATA. SEAN TODD, SECURITY SPECIALIST WITH NETWORK CENTER INC. IN FARGO, N.D., OFFERS SOME HELPFUL TIPS TO STAY SAFE WHILE WORKING REMOTELY.

NETWORK CENTER INC.