TOWER- They came to remember 143 men whose deaths had once been recorded largely as names on a list.
By the time members of the Soudan Mine Miners Memorial Committee finished their presentation Tuesday, Sept. 8, those names had become fathers, sons, husbands, immigrants, and young men who had gone underground hoping to build better lives for themselves and their families.
The Herbert R. Lamppa Civic Center was packed for the presentation, which followed the annual meeting of the Tower-Soudan Historical Society. At the front of the room were binders containing the results of five years of research into every man known to have died in or near the Soudan Mine between 1884 and 1957.
The mine began shipping ore in 1884 and operated until Dec. 15, 1962, producing more than 15 million tons of ore and employing as many as 1,800 miners at its peak. The site opened as a state park in 1965.
Committee chair Elaine McGillivray had a personal reason for wanting the stories of the dead included in the history told there. Her great-grandfather, Matti Soderena, died in the mine in 1894.
McGillivray recalled touring the mine with her father and hearing nothing about the workers who had died there. Her father returned in 1994, a century after his grandfather’s death, and again heard no mention of the fatalities.
“And guess what? The old Finlander got mad,” McGillivray said. “So he went over to Chisholm, to the research library, and he found an article that described the death of his grandfather. He came down to Minneapolis where we were living then, and he said, do something about this when you retire.”
A later family tour during which mine interpreter Karel Winkelaar discussed the deaths helped provide the spark for the memorial project. Retired mine interpreter Andy Larson supplied a three-sheet list of the dead that became the starting point for the committee’s research.
“Andy is really the catalyst and the bedrock behind this,” McGillivray said.
The all-volunteer group spent hundreds of hours between 2021 and 2026 searching death certificates, mine reports, newspaper articles, cemetery records, online resources, family histories, photographs, and accounts supplied by descendants.
“We started with 143 men on the list,” McGillivray said. “And we had no corroborating information. We just had the list.”
By the time of the presentation, the committee had found supporting documentation for 142 of the 143 men. Individual entries can include a miner’s age, birthplace or nationality, marital status, date and cause of death, photographs, official records, newspaper coverage, and family accounts.
The research also showed the difficulty of establishing even a miner’s name. Thirty-nine of the 143 men appeared in records under more than one version of their name.
Soderena was the most striking example. Records identified him by four versions of his first name and surnames that included Soderena, Sookran, Sooknan, and Sercos. His family later used Sooger.
The miners ranged in age from 16 to 62, with most of the deaths occurring among men in their 20s and 30s. Forty-four percent were married, although some had wives and children who remained in Europe.
Swedish, Finnish, and Austro-Hungarian immigrants represented the largest national groups among the dead, but the researchers lacked comparable figures for the overall workforce and could not determine whether any group died at a disproportionate rate.
Of the 123 deaths in the mine, researchers could not determine a cause in 41 cases, the largest category, while crushing accidents accounted for 39 deaths and falls for 23.
Soderena was 44 and had been in the United States for about 10 months when he died. He worked as a trammer, pushing carts filled with ore. According to a newspaper account, he pushed a cart toward the mine cage, but the cage was not in position. The cart plunged down the shaft, with Soderena following it approximately 200 feet to his death.
“Our family has had this question for years,” McGillivray said. “Our family wonders, why was the cage not there? I guess we don’t know.”
Soderena left a wife and family in Finland.
Matt Avikainen was 55, married, and the father of five children when he died on May 14, 1945. His three youngest children were walking home from school for lunch when they heard church bells ringing unexpectedly. In Soudan, church bells in the middle of a weekday could mean that a miner had been killed.
“Very likely, it was someone they knew,” McGillivray said. “His son, Donald, who was 17 at the time, thought to himself, I bet it’s my dad. Unfortunately, Donald was right.”
Avikainen worked as a barman, checking overhead rock after blasting. Working by candlelight, he used an iron bar to test the roof of an underground chamber for loose rock. Rock fell and crushed him.
His family still has his pocket watch, which stopped at the moment he died. His granddaughter, Jeannie Burlowski, brought the watch to the presentation and showed it to attendees afterward.
The youngest miner documented by the committee was Hans Larson, who was 16 when he died on July 23, 1917. Larson had gone to work in the mine after his father drowned in Lake Vermilion two years earlier. He was killed when a cable supporting a gin pole, a predecessor to a crane, broke and the pole struck him.
“Well, the person who died was only 16, so this is very, very sad,” McGillivray said. “And then the family photo there on the left, Hans, the 16-year-old who died, is in the middle. And we found out from the family that after he died, Hillard, the little boy to the right, went to work in the mine at age 15.”
The completed binders will become part of the mine’s continuing interpretation. McGillivray presented two sets to Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park, where interpretive supervisor Andrea Doerr formally accepted them. One set will be available at the dry house visitor center, while the other will be preserved in the park archives.
“We’re hoping to have them as a place that people can read while they’re at the visitor center at the dry house,” Doerr said. “And also hoping to open up more space and opportunities for programming to talk about mine safety and how that evolved, just like what Steve and Barb Burgess put together in those binders.”
The Tower-Soudan Historical Society will keep another set, which will be available at its History Education Center in the Historic Fire Hall this winter before being moved to the Tower Train Depot Museum in the spring. Andy Larson received a separate binder of stories in recognition of his role in starting the research.
The binders represent the first phase of the memorial effort. The committee next hopes to digitize the material for the Minnesota Digital Library. A third phase would create a permanent stone memorial naming the men.
For McGillivray, the project has already created a connection she never anticipated. A woman researching her great-great-grandfather found the committee’s spreadsheet online and discovered that she and McGillivray shared Soderena as an ancestor.
“She found me, and she found the grave of our great-grandfather,” McGillivray said. “And I met her for the first time up at the grave last November. So, she’s with us tonight. I found a new relative.”
For a project devoted to recovering the lives behind old names, finding a new branch of the family made a fitting end to the evening.