Change on the Range
Text & Photos by Margaret Haapoja
Gazing up at the steep walls of the Hill Annex Mine pit from my comfortable seat on the park’s pontoon boat, I was struck by the contrasting colors—clear sky and thin clouds reflected in still, blue water, green foliage, and rust red soil. My mother never considered that soil attractive when she scrubbed and bleached, trying in vain to remove the stains from my dad’s work t-shirts. Toiling in the Hill Annex Mine from the age of fifteen, when he cared for the mules, my father retired after nearly fifty years in that pit.
Back then rust was more than a color—it was the region’s lifeblood, a shade that pervaded every community. As we glide across the water, more than 350 feet deep in some spots, I can almost hear the familiar sounds of my childhood. Sharp whistles signaled an imminent blast of dynamite or the loading of ore into railroad cars. A high-pitched whine issued from tightening cables as the shovel bucket dug into the bank. And always there was the clatter of vibrating screens, the rumble of crude ore tumbling down chutes at the loading pocket, and the pounding of churn drills.
Now, where all was once motion and noise, all is silent and still. Birches and pines blanket the sides of the red earth pit. A pair of ospreys perch at the top of a power pole, and cormorants roost on a timber rising out of the water. Peregrine falcons soar over the cliffs and loons raise their young in the pit lake.
The Mesabi Bike Trail, a 132-mile path linking Grand Rapids to Ely, brings bicyclists right to the mine overlook. From Marble to Calumet, riders travel an old haulage road once used to transfer mining machinery from one end of the Range to the other. From Calumet, the bicyle trail runs along the abandoned Duluth Mesabi & Iron Range Railway grade, where mammoth steam locomotives known as Mallets whistled and wheezed every day of my childhood.
The Iron Range of my youth—the close-knit neighborhoods, the chain of immigrant communities, each with its own distinct personality, the bustling mining region with its boom-and-bust cycles that bound its people together—is still there, but it has changed. In 2006, six iron ore producers employed three thousand workers and turned out forty million tons of taconite pellets. Mines have modernized, reinventing themselves to adapt to an ever-changing steel industry. A few years ago, plants were closing and unemployment threatened, so the Range diversified, trading on its heritage and turning to tourism. Today a new mining era is dawning with projects such as the world’s first commercial iron nugget plant and the first steel plant on the Range, bringing hundreds of new jobs to the region. To reacquaint myself with my changing childhood home, I continued my travels across the Iron Range, visiting familiar haunts and discovering new traditions.
Ethnic Tapestry
Mechanical sounds aren’t the only ones missing from the modern Range. A cacophony of different dialects mingled in our small town as I was growing up. The Crottiers had a soda fountain back then, and I loved the exotic tones of Mrs. Crottier’s French accent. Within two blocks of our house lived the Bulgarian Erkeneffs, Scandinavian Johnsons and Carlmans, Italian Corteses, Serbian Lynchs and Berchins, Jewish Jaffes, Finnish Makis, and German Raffaufs. Most Range communities were tapestries woven from a mixture of nationalities.
No immigrants were more at home in the north woods than the Finns, who were drawn to jobs in a landscape reminiscent of their motherland. Many Finns settled around Embarrass and erected hand-hewn homes and farm buildings. Their craftsmanship is preserved in buildings on the Finnisih Heritage Homestead Tour, which includes a rare, ninety-foot-long house-barn built between 1907 and 1913. The silver patina of age rests lightly on the historic log structures, which testify to the tenacity of these pioneers who settled the area between 1890 and 1930. In fact, sisu is a Finnish word once defined by local resident Bill Seitaniemi as “stubbornness beyond reason.” The cold, which helped preserve the log structures, is a source of pride to local residents. A tourist brochure claims the title of nation’s cold spot with an officially recorded temperature of minus 57° F. in January 1996.
The area’s 165 log buildings, which ethnic historian Alan Pape referred to as “diamonds in the fields,” became the basis for Embarrass’ selection as one of “America’s 16 Uncommon Places,” by the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 1987. The structures represent one of this country’s most conspicuous collections of log buildings associated with a single ethnic group.
I especially admired the Nelimark sauna because Finnish steam baths have always been such an integral part of my life. According to former Embarrass resident Margaret Kinnunen, the sauna was a birth-to-death necessity for the Finnish settlers, used because of its warmth for bathing, giving birth, doing laundry, treating the sick, and preparing the dead for burial.
Room and Board
Tourists today can choose luxurious accommodations at hotels across the Range, but such deluxe housing wasn’t available in the early days. During the 1920s and 1930s, my grandfather was village policeman in Calumet and my grandmother ran a boardinghouse. Grandpa put up beaverboard partitions in the garage, moved in some beds, and boarded four single men who worked in the Hill Annex Mine. For a dollar a day, Grandma fed them, washed their clothes, and packed their lunch pails. The food was simple but substantial fare—meat and potatoes, homemade bread, rice pudding, rhubarb sauce, and lots of big molasses and sugar cookies.
Stopping in Gilbert for a bite to eat, we were surprised when a black man with a broad smile and a lilting island accent greeted us. Toney and Jo Pat Curtis’ Whistling Bird restaurant reflects the modern Range’s changing economy and ethnic complexion.
“It was the town’s first hotel,” says longtime Ranger, Jo Pat. “And it was a cathouse for many years. Italian has always been very popular on the Iron Range, so it used to be called Little Italy. When we bought it, there was a room all encased in glass where people could watch them making pasta with big pasta-making machines from Italy.”
Jo Pat met Toney, a native Jamaican, on a trip to Montego Bay around twenty years ago. They married and converted Little Italy into the Range’s first and only Jamaican restaurant, with dishes such as flame-grilled jerked shrimp or Rasta Pasta, and tropical drinks with colorful names—Pickled Parrot, Blue Jamaican, and Mango Bango. Reggae music plays, parrots perch here and there, and paintings of colorful island scenes decorate the bright orange and turquoise walls. The Caribbean cuisine is a far cry from the pasties and “South America” sandwiches (a spicy blend of canned meats and vegetables) miners carried in their lunch pails years ago.
Digging into the Past
Perhaps there is no better way to picture the past and understand the present of the Iron Range mining industry than to stand at the edge of an open pit and stare into its depths. And there is no wider manmade crater on the Range, indeed in the world, than the Hull-Rust north of Hibbing. This gaping hole stretches three miles across and reaches a depth of 535 feet. Embracing more than fifty individual mines that opened between 1895 and 1957, the pit continues to expand today with the operations of Hibbing Taconite Company.
From atop the edge of the pit, 340-ton haulage trucks look like Matchbox toys. Rows of retired mining machinery line the far hillside. Not far from the overlook, old-fashioned streetlights, crumbling foundations, and partially paved avenues mark the site of Old Hibbing, a community whose buildings were mounted on steel wheels and moved two miles south in 1918 so the ore beneath them could be mined.
The Hill Annex Mine also offers visitors an opportunity to contemplate past and present. These days it is the only intact natural ore mine in the world that is open for visitors to tour. Guide Gary Nyquist led our boat tour with a lively commentary—describing the difference between “merch” and “wash” ore; discussing the history of White City, a tarpaper shack village built above the pit by surveyors back in the 1800s; and explaining that nearly sixty-four million tons of iron ore were taken out of the Hill Annex pit between 1917 and 1978. Artifacts such as an old forty-ton Euclid truck parked on the side of the road look exactly like the one my dad once drove.
Fishing
Someday the Hill Annex pit lake might be stocked with lake and rainbow trout for angling, as has already been done with sixteen abandoned open-pit mines. “The fish stocking program is an extension of the agency’s efforts to reclaim and create new uses for mineland,” says Brian Hiti, Iron Range Resources deputy commissioner. “It brings tourists to the area for fishing and camping.”
Nyquist shifted the bus into low gear to climb out of the pit and we passed the site of the school I attended through ninth grade. Our tour nearly over, I glanced at the girl in the seat across the aisle. She was about eight years old, the age I was when Calumet was a thriving mining community. I realized pictures of miners in their ore-stained overalls didn’t flash across her mind. Sounds of steam locomotives, banging shovel buckets, and foreign dialects didn’t echo in her memory. Her understanding of the Mesabi Iron Range’s open pit mining era will come from this glimpse of the Hill Annex Mine.
If You Go
Hill Annex Mine Park
880 Gary Street
Calumet, MN 55716
Phone: (218) 247-7215
Visitor Center and Museum open 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Memorial weekend through Labor Day. Mine tours 10 a.m.–4 p.m. on the hour. Contact park office for more information.
Hull Rust Mahoning Mine Historic Site
Hibbing Area Chamber of Commerce
211 East Howard Street
Hibbing, MN 55746
Phone: (218) 262-3895
Sisu Heritage
Finnish-American Homestead Tours
P.O. Box 127
Embarrass, MN 55732
Phone: (218) 984-2084
Email: embarrasstownship@frontiernet.net
Guided tours are conducted from Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day, 7 days a week at 1 p.m. or by special appointment. Adults, $5; children under 12, $3.
Whistling Bird
101 Broadway Street North
Gilbert, MN 55741
Phone: (218) 741-7544