TOWER-SOUDAN- The Miner’s Memorial Project, an attempt to document all the miners who lost their lives while working at the Soudan Mine, is almost complete. The project is being undertaken by the Tower-Soudan Historical Society, with help from the Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park.
Starting in August, information on the 143 miners were available at the Tower Train Depot, though more work is still being done to make the presentations final. These miners died between 1884 and 1957. This is the first time all this information has been collected in one place.
Once finshed, there will be three complete sets of the information, one for the train depot, one for the state park visitor center, and one for the historical society archives.
“We still need to write some stories we have gleaned from our research,” said Elaine McGillivray, pictured at right, who has been actively working on this project, “We will be working on completing these stories over the winter.”
The goal of this project is to help remember this important, yet sad, part of this area’s history. The project was started by Andy Larson, who worked for 27 years as an interpretive guide at the mine and was a former president of the historical society. He created an initial list. Then in 2019, McGillivray learned of the list, and started to do present-day research. McGillivray has a great-grandfather who died in the mine in 1894. A small group of volunteers worked on research, using the Iron Range Research Center in Chisholm and other historical records.
Historical society members Mary Shedd and Leon Anderson are working on an update to the TSHS website.  It will include the nine-page spreadsheet (in both PDF and searchable format) with details on each miner, a key, and some interpretive material.