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Serving Northern St. Louis County, Minnesota

“Taconite Dreams” offers timely history lesson

Marshall Helmberger
Posted 12/3/15

REGIONAL—A new book published by the University of Minnesota Press provides one of the most fascinating and detailed accounts ever of the challenges faced over the years by the mining industry in …

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“Taconite Dreams” offers timely history lesson

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REGIONAL—A new book published by the University of Minnesota Press provides one of the most fascinating and detailed accounts ever of the challenges faced over the years by the mining industry in northeastern Minnesota.

“Taconite Dreams: The Struggle to Sustain Mining on Minnesota’s Iron Range,” by Jeffrey T. Manuel, offers particularly timely insights as the industry faces yet another imposing challenge to its existence, due to low-cost foreign imports. Manuel, an associate professor of history at Southern Illinois University, is an Anoka native who has long had an interest one of his home state’s most iconic industries.

As Manuel notes, the history of the Iron Range is one of constant battles to ward off the kind of economic dislocation that became the hallmark of so many other industrial zones in the U.S. in the post-WWII years— and he places the history of the Range within that larger national story of deindustrialization. His research on the subject began in Youngstown, Ohio, but it shifted to the Iron Range when he returned to Minnesota to complete his PhD at the University of Minnesota.

As the title suggests, much of Manuel’s focus is on the creation of the taconite industry in the 1950s, fathered by University of Minnesota engineer Edward W. Davis, who viewed it as the technological fix that would guarantee generations of prosperity for the Range. But, as with any change, the rise of taconite brought its own dislocations to the region, including the closure of the traditional, high-grade hematite mines, such as those then operating in places like Soudan and Ely on the Vermilion Range, and in other communities on the Mesabi and Cuyuna ranges. In the end, writes Manuel, while taconite did provide a 15-year boom in the 1960s and 70s, the boom turned to bust in the 1980s, beginning a jobs and population exodus that the region has struggled ever since to reverse. The challenges to the region have only grown in recent years with the increasingly competitive nature of the global metals market.

Manuel documents how the coming of the taconite era brought an end to the days of extreme wealth for Iron Range communities, which once levied high taxes on traditional iron ore mines to fund the construction of elaborate public buildings, exceptional schools, and very large city payrolls. Instead, following passage of the 1964 state constitutional amendment that sharply reduced the taxes levied on taconite producers, communities on the Range saw an end to the relative opulence of the hematite heyday, even as some of the elaborate public buildings in places like Virginia and Hibbing still harken back to better times.

Manuel provides valuable context to the Iron Range’s struggles and places the region’s history into the larger story of the decline of industrialization in the twentieth century. The book covers other fascinating parts of the region’s history, including the bruising legal fight over Reserve Mining’s dumping of taconite tailings into Lake Superior, as well as the role and policies of the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board in seeking economic diversification for the region.

Manuel’s book is a valuable look into a portion of Iron Range history that has previously seen little examination from scholars.

At 278 pages, including extensive footnotes, the book is a serious, well-informed, and worthwhile read for anyone with a passion for the history, and the future, of the Iron Range.

It’s available for $20.49 from Amazon, or for $27.95 from the University of Minnesota Press and can be ordered online at www.upress. umn.edu.