Target’s corporate archivists preserve a century of Minnesota retail history

Tucked inside a climate-controlled warehouse in northeast Minneapolis: a treasure trove of Target history.

Boxes lined with acid-free tissue hold vintage Dayton’s packaging. A Marshall Field’s restaurant counter gleams under sterile lighting. And reams of old marketing materials and weekly ads fill the shelves. All are part of the big-box retailer’s corporate archive.

Together, Robert Wood and Amanda Cowden collect, organize and safeguard more than a century of the Minneapolis-based Fortune 500 company’s history, from the early days of Dayton’s department store to the digital age of the Target app.

Target’s history began in 1902, when George Dayton opened Goodfellow Dry Goods in Minneapolis. Several generations of the family grew it into a multimillion-dollar business and eventually established the first Target, a discount offshoot from the main department store, in Roseville in 1962.

Today, there are nearly 2,000 Target stores nationwide, and the now-multibillion-dollar company is weathering an era of upheaval.

All of that is Wood and Cowden’s job to sniff out and preserve. Sometimes their work supports Target’s legal teams in defending the company’s intellectual property. Other times, it helps set designers create realistic period pieces.

Like for the 2020 Netflix show “Selena: The Series,” the project required several hours of research as well as gathering photos, signage and product details to replicate a 1980s Target store in South Texas. It amounted to “all of 15 seconds” of screentime, Wood said.

That, at least, Wood could pull from his own memory. He worked at the Brooklyn Center Target’s photo lab developing film in the early ‘90s. Wood joined Target’s photo production team in 1999, later leaving to pursue an art history degree. A visit to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles “cemented” his decision to become an archivist, which eventually brought him back to Target.

“I couldn’t look away. I just loved it,” he said. “As my parents would say, ‘What are you going to do with an art history degree?’ Well, I’m doing something with it.”

Cowden came from more of a research background, earning a master’s degree in library and information science. She thought she’d end up in academia, but an internship at General Mills’ corporate archive sparked her interest in the field.

In an interview edited for clarity and length, the duo shared what it’s like to be in their shoes.

Wood: We wear several hats. When we’re not doing research for a request, we might be organizing our collection, arranging and describing the collection, or trying to procure the things we need.

Cowden: You have to be curious, and you have to be interested. That Super Target weekly ad is not particularly exciting. But if you’re wearing the right hat when thinking about it, it can be interesting. And it takes a really long time to get the acumen about what’s in here, why it’s valuable and what matters. We have predecessors. People will come after us. We just steward our portion for this time.

Wood: And being an archivist for a corporation represents a lot of work for several different teams. The photography, the art direction, the decision to promote a particular item for a particular community.

Cowden: We get almost all of our content from other teams. And then other times, it’s just research, like looking at our own marketing and communications and saying, “We should probably have a copy of that.”

Wood: We don’t spend money collecting for the most part as a policy, but we have had donations, like the ‘T’ from Target Center was pulled out of a dumpster. We saved it, and it’s been electrified and used in other exhibits. We are very scrappy as a team of two.

Cowden: We did not do the dumpster pulling, just to be clear. That was another team member, and he donated it to us. When the capital ‘T’ went to a lower ‘t’ at Target Center, it was chucked. And then saved.

Cowden: You do have to love routine things. I spend a lot of time doing digital tasks. The weekly ad is no longer produced in a physical paper, so I have to find the digital PDF. I have to label it properly. I have to put it in the proper place.

Wood: But that’s the balance. When we have those moments where we can do something physical, we can give our brain a break, and then have the satisfaction of completing this particular task. Whereas there are other areas of the collection that will never be finished. We know that. The backlog is decades. Moments that haven’t happened yet will need to be archived in the future. Questions we haven’t thought of will come our way with ties to Target’s history.

Wood: There’s always an organic need for this kind of a collection. Whether a company designates somebody to do the job, there are people who naturally will start collecting and creating this timeline of content because they’re proud of their work or because they know there’s value in referencing it later on. There’s always somebody in a corporation that has a closet full of history.