TOWER — The stumps tell a story that few alive today can fully comprehend.
Standing before a packed audience at the Lamppa Civic Center on Tuesday evening, historian and author Aaron J. Brown painted a vivid picture of northern Minnesota’s transformation from vast wilderness to industrial heartland in a matter of decades.
Brown, who describes himself as a “histotainer” rather than a traditional academic historian, delivered his talk, “The World that Grew from Stumps and Slash,” to the Tower-Soudan Historical Society, weaving together family history, environmental change, and the immigrant experience in the early 1900s.
The presentation opened with a striking image from 1891, when one man described standing on a hill near what is now Mt. Iron and seeing “a veritable ocean of pine” that seemed “inexhaustible enough to last for ages.” According to Brown, those massive white pines — some 200 to 400 years old — were gone within a decade.
“There’s an Ojibwe legend that said a squirrel could run from the tops of the white pines in Minnesota all the way to the East Coast, just on pines,” Brown told the audience. “That’s how big and broad that forest was before we cut it down.”
Brown’s connection to the region runs deep. His grandfather worked as an underground miner on all three iron ranges and survived dangerous incidents on each. The family connection spans five generations in the area, with Brown’s children representing the sixth generation.
He used personal anecdotes and period documents to illustrate the jarring experience of immigrants arriving in the early 1900s. He quoted a 1902 letter from a college student describing the journey from Duluth as “monotonous” because “one could have ridden through forests instead of acres of stumps.”
The symbiotic relationship between logging and mining formed a central theme of Brown’s presentation. Workers often moved between logging camps in winter and mines during warmer months, creating a year-round labor force for some of the world’s most dangerous occupations.
“Where did the forest of the Iron Range go?” Brown asked. “A lot of it was buried. It’s down there now, because it was used to build underground mines.”
The environmental consequences were severe. The 1918 fire that destroyed Cloquet and Moose Lake, sparked by a train and fueled by slash piles from clear-cut logging, served as a wake-up call. Brown noted that Iron Range towns survived partly because they had “robust fire departments and a lot of people to dig fire lines” — municipal workers who had been criticized as political boondoggles proved essential for firefighting.
In an unusual historical footnote, Brown described how officials brought in thousands of sheep in the years following 1918 to clear underbrush and slash piles. These weren’t private livestock but “municipal sheep” or “corporate sheep” owned by railroads and local governments.
Brown’s upcoming book focuses on ten-time Hibbing Mayor Victor Power’s conflicts with U.S. Steel, but places that story within the broader context of deforestation, immigration, Prohibition, and the complex social dynamics of newly formed mining communities.
“They really just threw a bunch of people in one place who previously had never been together and saw what happened,” Brown said. “And what happened is, you know, here we sit.”
The evening concluded with Brown emphasizing the importance of historical societies in preserving stories that might otherwise be lost. Having spent a decade researching his book, he stressed how difficult it becomes to recover stories that aren’t properly archived.
Brown’s presentation offered audience members a chance to imagine their ancestors’ experiences — arriving by train through a landscape of stumps and destruction, finding work in dangerous industries, and building communities that would endure long after the “inexhaustible” forests had vanished.