Wenner Gas Company, Inc319 Main St, Cold Spring, Minnesota, United States

Carl, Pat, and Jim Wenner own and operate Wenner Gas Company Inc. and The Wenner Company.  The Wenner Company includes a Do It Best Hardware Store in Cold Spring, MN and Wenner Funeral Homes in Cold Spring and Richmond, MN.  They have also partnered with CHS to own and operate Rockville Propane Terminal. 

In the early 1940’s, The Wenner Company, Inc. in Cold Spring, MN, operated by Carl A. Wenner and his brother Marc, partnered with other hardware store owners in central Minnesota to create Falls Gas Company.  They bought land along the Burlington Northern right of way in Little Falls, MN, built a siding, and installed equipment to unload railcars into two 18,000 gallon storage tanks.  The idea was to deliver 100 pound cylinders of propane to their customers for cooking and water heating.  The Wenner Company owned land along the Burlington Northern tracks in Cold Spring they used to unload railcars of coal for home heating.  Every week they would use their one ton International truck to pick up cylinders at the stores in Richmond, Albany, St Joseph, etc., on the way to Little Falls to fill cylinders.  Falls Gas Company grew as people began replacing their coal furnaces with the economical, and clean burning propane furnaces.  When Minnegasco began piping cities like St. Cloud, Little Falls, Brainerd, and others with Natural Gas, Falls Gas Company members wanted out and the company began to shrink.  Carl’s two sons, Charles and John Wenner, then owners of The Wenner Company, bought Falls Gas Company from the rest of the members in the mid 1970’s and in 1978 they moved the storage tanks and equipment to their rail siding in Cold Spring.  Wenner-B Carl, Kelly and Pat Wenner  In 1979, Charles’ oldest son Carl J. Wenner, graduated from college and went to work for the company.  At the time, there were less than 40 bulk gas customers, and Carl could make the rounds to all of the customers in about a week.  The rest of the time he worked in the hardware store.  As the gas company began to grow in the 1980’s, Charles and John separated the gas company from the hardware store and created Wenner Gas Company, Inc.  The company now delivers propane to over 1500 bulk customers, “and we still deliver 100 pound cylinders to the cabins in the area”, says Carl.  In 2009, with the pending loss of rail service to Cold Spring, and the advent of the Rocori Trail, the current owners of  The Wenner Company and Wenner Gas Company, Inc. (Charles’ sons: Carl, Pat, and Jim) built Wenner Gas Terminal in Rockville, MN.  In 2013, seeing the need to expand the Terminal and guarantee the supply of propane in Central MN, the brothers sold part of the Terminal to Central Harvest States (CHS) to form Rockville Propane Terminal, LLC.  The terminal was expanded in 2014 to unload up to 10 railcars at a time and has a storage capacity of 620,000 gallons.