Aaron Brown is a writer, teacher, and lifelong resident of the Mesabi Iron Range, an area that has produced an enormous share of the iron ore that built America and won two world wars. In this episode, we take a look at the Iron Ranges of Minnesota with Aaron Brown as our guide. Aaron describes the geography of mining in Minnesota, the initial boom that drew thousands of immigrants to the area to work the mines, the experience of working in a mine, and how the continuous boom and bust cycles have shaped the lives of people in the area. We then talk about places folks should visit when they travel to the Mesabi Range and a few foods that should be on your short list. We finish with a few tips on how to connect with Bob Dylan’s history in the area (he was born in nearby Duluth but grew up in Hibbing.)
Show Notes
Aaron Brown talking about the Iron Range today on the Strong Towns podcast
Mississippi Valley Traveler posts about the Iron Ranges
Some of the places Aaron mentioned in the podcast:
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Transcript
45. Aaron Brown on the Iron Ranges of Minnesota
Sun, Jul 14, 2024 11:36AM • 1:16:11
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, range, places, work, iron, iron ore, mining, minnesota, miners, chisholm, mines, tours, towns, mesabi, pasties, country, history, steel, dylan, producing
SPEAKERS
Aaron Brown, Dean Klinkenberg
Aaron Brown 00:00
What do writers want? They want something to write about. And I always had that there was always in both in my family and in my life, but also the Range. Very early on, became a subject that I wanted to write about. I thought I would leave to become a famous writer somewhere else, but I could not escape the subject matter of our history, of our present, of the human drama that that happens here, and so that’s what I’ve been doing out here in the woods ever since.
Dean Klinkenberg 00:52
Welcome to the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. I’m Dean Klinkenberg, and I’ve been exploring the deep history and rich culture of the people and places along America’s greatest river, the Mississippi, since 2007. Join me as I go deep into the characters and places along the river, and occasionally wander into other stories from the Midwest and other rivers. Read the episode show notes and get more information on the Mississippi at MississippiValleyTraveler.com. Let’s get going.
Dean Klinkenberg 01:24
Welcome to Episode 45 of the Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast. The Mississippi River skirts around the edge of one of Minnesota’s iron ranges and through another one. In this episode, we delve into the world of the one the river skirts around on its western edge, the Mesabi Range. I lived in southern Minnesota for six years in the late 1970s early 1980s. The Iron Range, even though it was in the same state as me, may as just as well have been in Bolivia or Russia. Stories of conflict seem to be about the only ones that ever made the news from the Range, at least down where I lived. In 2011, I spent a month in Grand Rapids, where I got to see the Iron Range in a whole new way really. At that time, my guest in this episode, Aaron Brown, ran a Bob Dylan centric festival called Dylan Days, which is how I first learned about his work. We stayed in touch over the years, but only virtually. So it was really a delight to finally have the time to talk with him about the area where he’s lived his whole life. So in this episode, we take a look at the iron ranges of Minnesota with Aaron Brown as our guide. Aaron describes the geography of mining in Minnesota, the initial boom that drew 1000s of immigrants to the area to work the mines, what the experience was like to work in one of those mines, especially underground, and how the continuous boom and bust cycles have shaped the lives of people in the area. We then talked a little bit about places folks should visit when they travel to the Mesabi Range, and a few foods that you should definitely put on your shortlist if you’re going to be in the area. We finished with a few tips on how to connect with Bob Dylan’s history in that region. He was born in nearby Duluth, but grew up really in Hibbing, Minnesota. If you’re anywhere near the Iron Range, I highly recommend taking a side trip for at least a day to visit some of these sites. In the show notes, I’ve posted links to some of the places that Aaron mentioned, as well as to two of my posts that I wrote in the past about how to places to visit in the Iron Range.
Dean Klinkenberg 03:31
Have you been there? I’d love to know what your experience was like. So send me a note to [email protected]. As always, you’ll find the show notes at MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and then just click on the episode you’re interested in. As always, my love goes out to Patreon supporters who continue to keep this podcast going. For as little as $1 a day, you can join that community. And one of the benefits, one of the perks is you get early access to all these podcast episodes. Not interested in Patreon, well, you can buy me a coffee. I drink plenty of that, and every little bit helps sustain me. Want to know how to do either one of those again, just go to MississippiValleyTraveler.com/podcast and there you can find out how to join Patreon or how to buy me a coffee. And now on with the interview.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:24
Aaron Brown is an author, a columnist for the Mesabi Tribune and the Minnesota Reformer, and the communication instructor at Minnesota North College in Hibbing. He writes about the Iron Range at MinnesotaBrown.com. Welcome to the podcast, Aaron.
Aaron Brown 04:50
Thanks Dean, thanks for having me.
Dean Klinkenberg 04:52
You know, as we were just joking about earlier, we’ve tried for years to actually sit down and have a conversation in person, and I’m glad we get to do it now, but I’m a little sad that we’re not doing this over a beer or a cup of coffee.
Aaron Brown 05:02
Yeah, yeah, I know, right? And, or, or on the banks of the Mississippi that would be nice too.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:07
Or that too, or maybe at the Hull-Rust mine overlook, or something.
Aaron Brown 05:11
Yes, right?
Dean Klinkenberg 05:13
Although I don’t know if they allow beer up there anyways.
Aaron Brown 05:15
I don’t, well allow is a separate matter of what’s done so.
Dean Klinkenberg 05:21
Well thanks for taking time out of your busy day to do this. I think it would be beneficial if maybe we started by just going through some of the history of the Iron Range. I think it’s, it’s a really fascinating area that really captured my attention and imagination. I had a chance to spend about a month in Grand Rapids, more years ago than I want to admit at this point. It was 2011 and I had a chance to make a lot of trips to the Iron Range then, and get to know the area a little bit. And I realized how little I knew before then. Let’s just kind of start with the beginning. There’s more than one iron range for one thing, that’s the basic facts here, there are multiple ranges.
Aaron Brown 06:03
There are multiple of up to four, depending on your interpretation. There were three productive iron mines or iron ranges. The first was the Vermilion, which is the one up near Ely, that was the first one to produce iron ore that was shipped for making steel. And then the Mesabi, which is the largest iron range, was at its discovery, the largest iron range in the world. Now it’s the largest in North America. And then little later on, the Cuyuna Range, which is down by Brainerd Crosby Ironton area, and that was a smaller range that nevertheless produced ore for years. So those are the three productive ranges. There’s the Gunflint Range, which is a small, small iron range up in the northeast. And there are other little iron spots around Minnesota, but, but today, the Mesabi is the only active iron mine, iron range remaining. The Mesabi, and of course, Mesabi means “sleeping giant” in the Ojibwe language. So it’s this notion of, you know, it’s a formation that looks like a giant laying on the land, sleeping. And of course, the legend of Mesabi is that the resources of the region would would provide for the people of the future, the Giant’s treasures, of course, and for the native people that was wild rice and game and water. And another interpretation is that timber and iron ore resources could be included with that. And since, since European settlement, that’s that’s been the story here.
Dean Klinkenberg 07:45
So it’s an area that has a long history of providing the basic necessities of life, and people felt, I think, a very strong connection to the those handful of basic resources, whether it was the wild rice or iron ore.
Aaron Brown 07:58
Mm-hmm. And of course, they’re, they’re still producing natural you know, the wild rice is still here, and it’s still a active cultural area for the Ojibwe people. And it’s, of course, interspersed with this passive industrial, I guess some would say carnage, some would say progress. It’s this enormous industrial zone of the Iron Range. To see it from the ground is astounding, but to see it from the air is to truly see the the scope of the largest mining region in in America.
Dean Klinkenberg 08:31
So is this the only place in the US where we mine iron?
08:36
No, there’s still iron mines in Michigan. Um, historically, a lot of the iron in the 1800s for instance, iron came from places like Alabama and Pennsylvania and iron was actually a rather difficult commodity to get, because they were mining harder, lower grade forms of iron. And in the 1890 or 1880s explorations were made here to find iron ore, and it was ignored for actually, many decades prior, because it was a strange kind of iron ore, hematite. It was soft. Wasn’t like the iron they were mining in the other parts of the country or even the world. But once they discovered how to process the ore they realized it was richer. It was actually vastly richer iron ore, and that’s what fueled the boom that formed most of the communities you’ll find in this region today, is that they’re all about 100 years old, maybe 120 at most, 125 in a couple instances. And these are bets, because that’s when the Mesabi was opened, and that’s when all these towns were started.
Dean Klinkenberg 09:46
So and that was really a period of explosive growth, as I recall reading this, like once they figure that out, then mines opened up all over the place, and lots of they needed a lot of labor. Where did the people come from who were going to work in the mines?
Aaron Brown 10:01
Yeah. Well, there simply weren’t many people at all in the region, of course, and so they had to come from other places. Some came from mining regions like Michigan, where they had an active copper mining industry and then an iron mining industry. But that wasn’t enough, and most of that labor came from overseas. It was immigration mostly from Europe. Forty nationalities are represented in the history of the Mesabi Iron Range, again, mostly European, though not exclusively. And yeah, basically the immigration laws of the of the 19th century and early 20th century were quite a bit different than today. People could if they were healthy, and especially if they were married, could could get into the country relatively easily. And because of the demand for labor, there was a straight line you would you’d get off the boat in a place like New York, maybe up in Canada, or some other place. You get on a train, if you were from, say, the coast of Dalmatia, former Yugoslavia, modern day Croatia, or Southern Italy, where a lot of immigrants came. You came from a warm Mediterranean climate. You came to New York, depending on the time of year. Could be hot or cold, but then you got on the train, and you went through Chicago, and you went north, and you went further north, and you went through a forest that was cut down, that was acres and acres of stumps. And if it was winter, it was like a barren wasteland, it would have seemed. And then you arrived at a place like Hibbing or Virginia or Chisholm, and you got out of that train, and you felt the, probably the coldest weather you ever experienced in your life. And then they put a shovel and a pick in your hand, and with perhaps no English at all to your name and your language abilities, you were sent down a hole with a guy, maybe a guy who spoke entirely different language than you, and you’d have to mine iron ore, and that was the history of a lot of people who came here.
Dean Klinkenberg 12:09
You make it sound so attractive so.
12:12
Well, I wanted to just highlight. I like to highlight there’s kind of a, you know, a hero’s tale of settlement and development in this country, and I understand that that’s part of our history, and it’s worth celebrating, but I also like to highlight how much of a sacrifice it was to come here for the people who did. It was very difficult. It wasn’t until the next generation, or even two, before people really realized the benefits of the American dream, as it would be called. And so that generation that came here really put it all on the line for future generations.
Dean Klinkenberg 12:47
Absolutely. I know that’s certainly true in my family too. The immigrant ancestors that came here gave up their previous occupations to farm and had a tough go of it. I don’t think they ever really got too far ahead, but their kids had a better life.
Aaron Brown 13:00
Yep, exactly.
Dean Klinkenberg 13:03
So they, when folks were coming to this country, then they somehow had to learn about the jobs in the Iron Range. I vaguely remember hearing stories that maybe some of the mining companies had representatives in New York or at immigration ports to try to recruit people to go to Minnesota. Is that, is that right?
13:21
That is true. And in fact, they went even farther than that. Once they found a reliable agent from another country in northern Minnesota, they would send these people back to their home countries to recruit people that was actually prominent in certain communities, and that’s why certain towns, certain places where certain mines are located, are more disproportionately have had more, you know, people of one particular ethnicity than another. You know, Hibbing is a little more Catholic and a little more eastern and southern or Southern European than some of the other range towns, simply because they had, well, his name was Paul Morris, a gentleman who went back to Croatia and and very lucratively for himself, recruited a lot of people to come to the land of milk and honey, of Hibbing, Minnesota and and he then, you know, was kind of the dean of their community, their leader and so and later, he was a bootlegger and a major organized crime leader, but, but that’s, that’s my research, that’s my story, but, but that’s all in in relationship to what the mines were doing to bring in labor. They needed labor so badly they had money sitting on the ground. Literally, it was such a prosperous mine. And the only thing separating them from profit was people with shovels. They needed more of them. So very, very good time.
Dean Klinkenberg 14:55
Do you have a sense of what they were promised, what the agents promised people as they were just setting foot in this country?
Aaron Brown 15:01
Bonuses. They were promised cash bonuses, and they were promised enough work to make money. You know, the thing that a lot of people realize is that a lot of these initial workers, the first ones to come, weren’t coming to settle in America to be citizens. They were coming to make money. A lot of them thought they would be heading back to their home countries, pockets full. And, you know, would be big men in their old country, because there was no money over there and and there was no way to make money. So coming to America was a strategy to get ahead. Some of them did this, of course, as we know, in market capitalism, not everybody wins. And so a lot of people came to America found that the conditions for making money were fickle. Mines paid on the contract system, which meant that you were paid for the ore that you mine, not for the hours that you worked. So if you were in a very prosperous corner of the mine, you could make a lot of money, but if you were not, you could work your butt off and still not have much to your name. That was happening all the time. And so people often stayed in America to become American citizens. And like I said, in their kids would enjoy the America but almost as a second, that was plan B for a lot of them. You know, there were some fleeing European problems, economic problems, social problems, political problems. You know, the Finnish community is a good example. Early Finnish immigrants were socialists fleeing Czarist Russia, Russian power, and then after a while, when the socialists took over in Russia, there was a little role reversal in some of the, what they called the whites, the reds, and the whites, the some of the white Finns came over, the more conservative Finns, and and then that flipped again as there as their governments went up and down. So, you know, there, there were a lot. There’s a lot of, you know, it wasn’t just one thing, just because the Germans were here, or the Slovenians or the Finns or the Italians, these these countries were very nuanced, and people were often fleeing specific regions for specific reasons and and so a lot of that is reflected in in the groups of people that came over and settled people knew each other. There was a community of people who maybe even knew each other in the old country, who then set up shop in a new part of the world. So very fascinating history.
Dean Klinkenberg 17:51
Yeah, there’s so many questions. It’s interesting that so I remember that they were, they’re basically treating miners early on as self employed contractors. And this was a system that was just made for all kinds of abuse. There were different ways that, I guess, supervisors could assign certain people to certain more lucrative jobs made for a kickback, or the mines were dangerous to work in. How much turnover was there among employees at that time, if some when somebody got a job there, if they weren’t doing well, how did they adapt to that? Did they leave? Did they find a more lucrative position somewhere else?
18:32
There was a very high turnover? I can’t, you know quantify exactly, but, but there were several things that could happen once you took a job at a mine. You could be killed or badly hurt, and that did happen somewhat regularly, particularly the newer, it was just like what you hear about the military in combat, you know, the newest recruits, the new soldiers, are the ones most in danger until they gain some experience and have a better chance of survival. It was like that for the miners. You know, a lot of times it would be the people with six weeks in country who would be sent down into the dark mine with a man who spoke a different language with industrial sized handheld drills and hammers and picks and there’s, there’s, there’s drifts and and shafts all over the place for you to fall in, or, you know, and so the newest miners were often the most in danger, and there are people down in those underground shafts and drifts to this day whose names are not known because they were too new to be properly recorded, and they were buried in the mine. They were, you know, so so that that’s one outcome, not the best. Some, some would work for a time. If they didn’t like the mine, they might try other things. There a lot of the small businesses, you know, being famously Sunrise Deli, which is kind of an iconic or, I should say, Sunrise Bakery, is an iconic bakery in Hibbing, still in operation today, and the founder was a miner who said, “Nope, had enough of this, I’d rather bake bread.” And so they would go into business for themselves if they could. Run a bar, run a bakery, run a delivery service, if they could get enough scrape together enough capital to buy what they needed to run the business. And then, and then some would go out and work in the logging camps, or they would go out West and try to find more prosperous times. A lot of them wanted to farm, but couldn’t afford land. And sometimes you heard about people who got enough money to buy some land and they would go farm.
Dean Klinkenberg 20:53
And it’s not exactly the most hospitable area to be farming, though, but yeah, were there any crops that folks were able to grow to that were reasonably reliable?
21:05
Northern Minnesota is not a huge agricultural area. I would say that you can farm here, and many do. I have a nice garden myself, but enough to live on is another matter, and certainly enough to produce commercial quantities reliably, because there’s such a variation in the growing seasons and and moisture. I mean, last year, just as an example, last year, we had a drought. This year we have flood. And so, you know, it’s such a short growing season that it’s hard to grow, say, corn, you know, or wheat, or these kinds of things here. So potatoes, there was pretty, pretty good potato crops. And you could grow other things, other produce on a kind of as needed basis, hard to farm as a professional endeavor. Some tried, many failed, but, but it was, you know, we’re not far from much better farmland out in western Minnesota or the Dakotas, and that’s where a lot of people would go.
Dean Klinkenberg 22:13
Right. So who, who owned the mines?
22:18
Different companies, but the biggest and most powerful by far was United States Steel Corporation. US Steel was formed in 1901 as an amalgamation of the steel holdings of Andrew Carnegie and the steel iron and shipping interests of John D Rockefeller, among others, including JP Morgan’s money and some other money investments, and it created the world’s largest corporation, the biggest corporation by far in the world, and the first billion dollar capitalized corporation on the planet Earth. It was unfathomably powerful compared to other companies of its time and largely immune from antitrust, because it had been crafted in just such a beautiful way to avoid the recent antitrust concerns of the time. So US Steel owned the Oliver Iron Mining Company, which ran, I don’t know, 60 to 70% of the iron mines in the region, and because of that share, they were the most powerful force, politically, economically, culturally, on the range. Now, there were some other smaller companies too, but they fell in line with they were the little brush to US Steel.
Dean Klinkenberg 23:37
All right. I don’t know how many people really appreciate, sort of the whole production process that went into like that fed the steel industry like so US Steel didn’t just operate mills in Pittsburgh or Cleveland or places like that. They own the ground where they extracted the iron ore too. And this process did they own the the boats too, that moved the iron ore from Minnesota to the Great Lakes.
24:00
Exactly. That was the that was the reason US Steel was formed. John Rockefeller owned the iron ore and the shipping and Carnegie owned the steel mills. That’s a crude simplification, perhaps, of the situation, but they were always squabbling over money, over power, over, you know, terms. And it was led to a lot of instability in the industry in terms of supply. And, of course, a lot of investors like JP Morgan didn’t want this to happen anymore, so they solved the problem with a vast amount of money. And they have vertically integrated steel company that that produced a model that, frankly, is still the model for a lot of industries. Try to control as much of the whole process as you can so that you reap the benefits and the cost savings at every stage of the production.
Dean Klinkenberg 24:51
And in the process, like 10s of 1000s, if not hundreds of 1000s, of people were dependent on those companies for their daily living then. At the peak about how many people worked in the mines, just in the Mesabi range, or?
25:06
Probably, you hear different estimates. But if you go up and through like World War Two times you you might hear about 50,000 people on the Mesabi. Population was, at one time, bring 100,000 in the region, and you had a large maybe 40 or 50,000 and that was right at the end of the era when you literally needed people with shovels and picks. They might have had big steam shovels, and they did have big steam shovels moving iron ore, but you still needed workers on the ground to kind of fill buckets and fill trams and carts. There was still some underground mining through the 1950s um, and and so you needed physical labor a lot more than you would in the years that would follow now. Um, today, there are just shy of 4000 miners working the Mesabi, and they’re producing the exact same amount of ore as they were at the peak of of all of those people working. So it’s pretty much a 10th of the workforce as the peak, but producing the same amount of iron ore. Well, you can, you know, so times can be good for the iron industry, but there’s still so many fewer workers that it’s been really hard on the communities.
Dean Klinkenberg 26:34
Right. It’s the, it’s the same story that happened throughout all of the industrial sectors of our economy, right? Mechanization and, robots, etcetera.
26:42
Yeah, just like Detroit. Detroit’s whole problem was, you no longer needed that vast workforce to make the cars. You could do it a lot fewer people, right?
Dean Klinkenberg 26:50
And it happened in agriculture too. Combines replaced field hands or so. So I remember also like, vaguely like this might have been from Europe, by the way, we should mention that you wrote a book called Overburden in 2007. It’s a collection of stories and about your your years writing about and growing up on the Iron Range. Terrific book. I have a copy. Everybody should go get one. Maybe you’re going to have a follow up to that at some point here.
27:19
I’m working on a book now that’ll be a historical book called “Power in the Wilderness”, and I hope to do kind of a maybe around 20 years, kind of a new look. A look back on on the Range, because a lot’s changed since I wrote that book.
Dean Klinkenberg 27:34
Right? And we’ll come back to that. But I like one thing I imagine is different now, is that you probably have a place to buy pants now, which you wrote about was not a thing back 20 years ago.
27:44
So, yeah, well, I do find my pants. Unfortunately, they have to come from the internet quite often because a lot of the stores that sell them are closed, but there is still a couple of nice tailor shops where a man of my pear shaped variety find well fitting clothing.
Dean Klinkenberg 28:03
So that’s that’s great. I was thinking, probably, from your book, maybe I read this, that during World War Two, something like three quarters of the iron ore that we mined for the war effort came from one mine in Hibbing. Does that sound familiar?
28:17
Yeah, that that was true in both wars, both World Wars, the Hull-Rust Mine, I think, was 85% of the American war efforts in World War One, and, like you said, about three quarters in World War Two. And that’s not to say that the other mines weren’t producing there. You know, the whole production of all of these steel needs of America, coupled with this massive war effort, were were sustained by Minnesota and Michigan iron mines, and Minnesota being a larger portion of the of the load. So you can really say that the steel that is in all of our highways and bridges and buildings and cars our country and, of course, our tanks and our planes and our guns that went overseas during the wars was fed by the earth that people stood on here, earth that now no longer exists. You know, you talk about the picture of the big pit in Hibbing. You know, that’s a pit that was once land. In fact, there was a town sitting 300 feet above where the ground is now. And that that went all over the country, all over the world, in the form of steel.
Dean Klinkenberg 29:34
It’s a, it’s amazing to think how much of the material that built our country, and, you know, played such an important role in our history, came from just that small area. And fun fact, you know, it was American soil in part, because of a surveyor’s error or a misunderstanding of where the Mississippi River began, as, as I recall from history.
29:55
Yeah, um, Mississippi River was one of the confusing points, and then the Rainy River. And. And you know, some of the there’s a certain interpretation that, had they followed their intent, the American border would have been essentially the Mississippi River, where it curves in Minnesota and and it would have brought the Iron Range. Would have literally been a border region. And it can just imagine the squabbles over mineral rights on an international border like would have been crazy.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:27
We might have had a war with Canada.
30:29
I think it’s not, especially early on, you could easily have imagined that just because of the money involved.
Dean Klinkenberg 30:37
So tell me a little bit about your family history in the Range and when did your ancestors show up?
30:44
Well, different threads of the family came at different times. Most of my family came as as European immigrants coming to this region to work. My father’s line, the Browns were from Cornwall, England. They were some of those early Cornish miners. Cornish Cornwall is a mining region in southeastern England, and it has, you know, generations, centuries of mining history behind it. If you ever saw the show Poldark, you know some of that history. And and so that that was where my father’s, the Brown name, came from, Cornwall. They came early, the Cousin Jack. Cousin Jacks were the Cornish miners who were experts and kind of taught other people how to mine on the ground. And that was kind of my, my, my father’s side is very much tinkerers, mechanics, miners, operators for generations, and as far as I can tell, going back to the Dark Ages, they were tinkering with metal. And so that’s and then, then my my father’s mother, my maternal grandmother, was a full blooded Finn. And the Finns also came a little later to the Range. And her family kind of followed the, you know, the ups and downs of the Finnish experience, which is Finns, came early. They were blacklisted from the mines for because so many Finns were organizing labor unions, and so there’s a lot more poverty and a lot more challenges in the Finnish community early on. And that was kind of, you know, one part of my family history, and then, and then the other side, Scandinavian, Scandihoovian, you know, my my grandfather was a miner, my mom’s father was a miner, and, you know, his father was a train conductor or train engineer for railroads that hauled iron ore, and so that’s kind of the, you know, that’s, that’s the vibe. And like I say in the book, I was the first in my I think we’ve been on the Range for five generations, and I was the first in my father’s line to never work in a mine. My father, grandfather, great grandfather and great great grandfather all worked in a mine, and I never did.
Dean Klinkenberg 33:10
Well, you construct sentences, so you’re still kind of in the construction phrase.
33:15
I am. It’s this process. It is a process, and there is a market, supply and demand is not always what you want, but yeah.
Dean Klinkenberg 33:21
Tell me, I know that feeling. So what was life like for you growing up in the Range? Did you grow up in Hibbing or kind of out in the country, or… ?
33:35
In the country outside of Hibbing. Actually, Cherry is where I went to school, which is just east of Hibbing, and I grew up just a little southeast of that, in a place called Zim the Sax-Zim Peat Bog, by the way, if your listeners, any birding enthusiasts, might that might ring their bells a little, the Sax-Zim Bog is one of the premier North American birding sites, especially in the winter. You can get your snowy owls there, and that’s the big attraction, and and so I didn’t know that. Growing up there, I knew that I lived on a junkyard that my grandfather and father ran, and we lived in a trailer house, and I never noticed the birds. We had other problems, but, you know, grew up, you know, a little little closer to the edge, both economically and socially. And, you know, it was a fascinating upbringing for a boy to just play in junk and look at all those old cars. And I talk about that in the book a little bit, but I loved it. And I also learned a lot like go to school and go to college. I was always fascinated by reading too. So kind of melded to the kind of very blue collar. I don’t even know if it was blue. It was dirty. Dirty collar.
Dean Klinkenberg 34:50
Rust colored, color.
34:52
Rust. Yeah, rust and yeah, tetanus. And I. And and then, and then, a love of reading and love of books and writing. I, early on I knew I wanted to be a writer. So that’s, you know, it’s been a, you know, what do writers want? They want something to write about. And I always had that. There was always in both in my family and in my life, but also the Range, very early on, became a subject that I wanted to write about. I thought I would leave to become a famous writer somewhere else, but I could not escape the subject matter of our history, of our present, of the human drama that that happens here. And so that’s what I’ve been doing out here in the woods ever since.
Dean Klinkenberg 35:41
Hey, Dean Klinkenberg here, interrupting myself. Just wanted to remind you that if you’d like to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that is set in places along the Mississippi. My newest book, “The Wild Mississippi”, goes deep into the world of Old Man River. Learn about the varied and complex ecosystem supported by the Mississippi, the plant and animal life that depends on them, and where you can go to experience it all. Find any of these wherever books are sold.
Dean Klinkenberg 36:20
So how much was, don’t know quite know how to ask this, how much was mining sort of a presence in your in your mind and imagination at that time? Did your did family members ever take you on tours of the mine tell stories about working there?
36:36
My grandfathers, both did. They were both miners. My grandpa, Grandpa Brown wasn’t a miner for most of his life, but early on he was an underground miner, so he always had good stories. And then my Grandpa Johnson, my mom’s dad, worked a career at Eveleth Taconite, and so he had more perspective, more modern taconite mining life. I remember going to a retiree picnic with him shortly after he retired. My father worked in the mines in the early 1980s but was laid off with a lot of other miners in the economic downturn of the ’80s. 1984, ’85, ’86 was kind of actually it was a depression locally. It was a recession nationally, but it was a catastrophic, one of the big taconite plants closed. A lot of them were shut down for a year, and it was a very catastrophic time for the region. That was my first consciousness. That was when I went to kindergarten and first grade, and Challenger blew up and we had no money. That’s what I remember.
Dean Klinkenberg 37:40
Good times.
Aaron Brown 37:41
Yeah, right, not so good. But I, you know, make it sound like I was, you know, world weary. In truth, I liked playing in mud and running around with my friends, just like any kid. It was actually a really nice childhood. It was a good community. Just, you know, that was the hardship the challenges, and it did affect our lives. The junkyard closed. It was not a was not a profitable junkyard. My father spent a long time trying to find work over the rest of my childhood, you know, stints here and there. And you know, that definitely affected and a lot of families were going through that, because not everybody got back on at the mines when they reopened. It was one of those downsizing periods, and a lot of a lot of families. It was, it was very common among my peer group to just not have much money. It was, you know, we always said there was a we had a we had a rich friend. His parents both had jobs, and he had a split entry house that didn’t have wheels, and that was rich.
Dean Klinkenberg 38:47
Right, right. I think basically you wrote in the book that there were basically, what, lower middle class and a few middle class people, and that was about it.
38:55
Yeah, yeah. It’s changed a little since, but it’s but that’s very much what it was like people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s on the range would would generally identify with that.
Dean Klinkenberg 39:07
Mining, like a lot of extraction industries, there are so many boom and bust cycles across time. How do you see that shaping the character or the mentality of people in the Iron Range?
39:21
It’s certainly created a cult, it’s a cultural touchstone. Like everybody knows the ups and downs of mining. When the times are good, that’s when you buy your your snowmobile and your four wheeler or your new truck, and then things are good, and you, you might get a house, or you, you know, there’s a prosperity to it that everybody celebrates. But then when times are bad, you know, you might have to sell that four wheeler or snowmobile, you have to figure out how to bring in enough money to pay the mortgage on the house. You have to kind of scrap your way through in existence. And that’s a shared experience. It’s not just you generally going through it. It’s it’s a community of people going through it together, the ups and the downs. It’s not to say that everything’s, you know, roses and rainbows, we’re all doing our best and hugging each other a lot. It’s actually the opposite of that. But it is kind of a shared experience that people relate to and and support each other through in our own way. You know, it’s certainly social problems and things come during the bad times, but generally speaking, it’s a survivalist kind of community. The the idea of running off is is something that a lot of people just won’t consider. You know, they want to stay and try to get through to the next good cycle.
Dean Klinkenberg 40:45
And I imagine, too, because of the geographic isolation of the area, area that it’s sort of like the the survival skills are really important in multiple levels. It’s a very unforgiving environment to live in winters. Well, Embarrass, Minnesota usually shows up among the coldest places in North America by January or so. So it’s unforgiving in that way. But also, then there’s that geographic isolation that I would imagine it kind of breeds a sense of taking care of yourself and your own first and foremost.
41:19
There’s an individualism coupled with so the thing that made the Range unique, in my mind, was it was have an individualistic spirit, like self reliance was very important, but it was also a deep community, you know, vibe as well. There’s kind of a hybrid between collectivist and individualistic cultures, you know. It’s become probably more individualistic as people have kind of isolated through technology and, you know, whatever, over time, but that individualism certainly comes from that shared experience of having to kind of fend for yourself during the hard times. And you know, isolation is certainly part of the culture as well, getting by on your own, making your own entertainment, because there aren’t any nightclubs, you know, or, you know, Taylor Swift doesn’t come here, you know, that kind of thing. It’s not that kind of place. You got to figure out how to enjoy yourself, you know. And that’s that’s always been part of the story as well. You know, those early immigrants, a lot of them stayed because they they couldn’t get away. They were they were scared. They didn’t have enough money for a train ticket, and there were no good roads at that time. And while that’s all improved since, you know, I remember years in living memory where my family didn’t go to Duluth because we weren’t sure our car would make it, you know. So there is, you know, times like, you know, you have a car that can reliably get you to the Twin Cities, you know, you know. So not everybody does, so.
Dean Klinkenberg 42:53
Right, right.
Dean Klinkenberg 42:54
So you mentioned the wide variety of ethnic groups that settled in the range. 40 or so. Are there places in the range today where you can still get a sense of those, those older ethnic communities?
Aaron Brown 42:54
…there is that too.
43:13
Shadows and vestiges I would say, you know, the best place is to go to the museum and see how that looked, Minnesota Discovery Center, and see how that looked. You will see it in our town, in our street names and the names of some of the historic buildings and some of the marble work and the concrete messages imprinted from the past. You’ll see ethnic names you wouldn’t see elsewhere, and you’ll, of course, see it in our phone books. Not that anyone uses phone books, but if you I read names at my colleges, my community colleges, graduation and so you know, you you read a lot of Slovenian, Croatian, Italian, you know, names that you know, reflect that history. But in truth, the ethnic groups kind of homogenized over time. Lot of intermarriages, things that would have been scandalous, you know, even 80 years ago, are now commonplace. Ethnic groups marrying, and a lot of us have kind of adopted, you know, I’m not Italian by blood, but we love porketta in our family. And that is a inter that was a product of an intermarriage my actually, my grandfather’s sister married Leo Fraboni, of the famous Fraboni Sausage Company, which makes a fine porketta that we still enjoy. and so like that intermarriage and cultural kind of combinations over, over, many generations. Now, five generations, six generations. It’s not quite like it was in terms of ethnic identity, but there are certainly, you know, in the DNA it’s all in there. You know, it’s all in there.
Dean Klinkenberg 45:03
I imagine, like the spelling nightmare. If a Czech person married a Finnish person and they hyphenated their name, you know?
45:11
Well, the really hard one is when family members, back in 1908 spelled their own name differently and were related, but have different spellings on their name, and then sometimes they would press Americanization and pronounce their names differently, even if they’re spelled the same. And as the graduation name reader, I’m still reaping the effects of that.
Dean Klinkenberg 45:33
You are a brave man. Yeah, I think you sort of hit on this too. It seemed like, if there’s one place, probably where you get, where you can connect a little bit with some of the the range of ethnic groups in that area, maybe it’s through food. Yeah, pasties, you know, have a, they’re popular food up there. And they, they believe it came from Cornwall initially, right? They were Cornish.
45:59
That is, right. I have a family. I have a family Cornish pasty recipe in a box somewhere that I have not yet worked up the courage to actually make for myself. But I do consume a number of pasties in a year, more than your average person. And and, yeah, so the Cornish pasty meat pie, if you’re not familiar with it very buttery. It’s basically half butter, half meat, and with a with some vegetables in there too. And of course, famously, the authentic pasty also has rutabaga. That’s a big key ingredient. But anyway, or swedes, as they were called in Cornwall, call them swedes. Anyway, I digress, but basically, that was a food that the Cornish miners brought and and the advantage of it is it says pie. You can wrap it, you can put it. You can put it in the oven in the morning, warm it up, and then wrap it, put it in your overall pocket, and it’s still going to be warm lunch break, and you can eat it without utensils. It has those little the ridges which you can hold and use as handles. You don’t have to, if your hands are dirty, you can discard the ridges that you were touching and just eat the good part. And so that’s that was a very popular food, because even if you weren’t Cornish, you realized the advantages of eating that, if you were in a mine and so that, and then the Southern European former Yugoslavian countries had different traditions with petitza, a dessert bread, and that got to be very popular. There were mojakkas, soups and stews and these got to be things that were served. Sarmas, were these little cabbage rolls. were, you know, they crossed the ethnic lines, because people would serve the food to their friends and serve them at functions. And people got to like different kinds of food. And so it was kind of a melting pot. You do have a very interesting culinary tradition here. Porketta, pasties are, are probably among the distinct foods. Porketta is a spiced pork that’s fennel is the key ingredient in a in a porketta. And those are, you know, things that I greatly enjoy and and I’m not necessarily related to those traditions genetically.
Dean Klinkenberg 48:29
Right? Although you can proudly claim the pasty tradition.
48:32
Pasties for sure. I’m half pasty. I’m more pasty.
Dean Klinkenberg 48:37
I love them. There’s a shop in Grand Rapids, Pasties Plus. They specialize. Yeah, but I noticed that you can pretty much find them in just about any grocery store in the area too, it seems.
48:49
Yeah. The even, the even, like Walmart sells them, but, but like local grocery stores will carry up Fraboni’s makes them. I’m not here to promote my great uncle’s company, but Fraboni’s makes a good pasty that is available at a lot of local grocery stores, and those are the ones that I tend to eat the most.
Dean Klinkenberg 49:09
Yeah, well, and you mentioned the Sunrise, I guess, Bakery, I guess I was thinking.
49:14
Deli. There’s a deli. They’re different companies, but yeah, they’re both old companies, in Hibbing, both related. They were offshoots of the same original owners, but the bakery is the one that makes, they have, I think, pasties. And, of course, the thing local, you know, the churches had all these pasty sales that was a common fundraiser. So there’s a lot of pasties that are made by church ladies and youth groups and I made for the Cherry High School band. We had a pasty, I remember making pasties. You’d stay up overnight making pasties once a year, and then proceeds would fund the band. So that’s that’s something I remember.
Dean Klinkenberg 49:56
Maybe it was Sunrise Deli that I stopped at that had a like, prepared food section where I got some shawarma to go.
50:03
Yeah, that’s, that’s the deli, and then the bakery is not far away, and that’s, that’s baked goods, but yeah.
Dean Klinkenberg 50:09
So obviously, if you’re visiting the area, you have to go to both.
50:13
Well, you need to go everywhere. Yeah, if they serve food, you got to try it.
Dean Klinkenberg 50:17
Yeah. Let’s talk a little bit about travel then, about visiting the Range. I remember I went, I had made multiple day trips into the Iron Range when I was in Grand Rapids. And I remember maybe I had already talked to you, or read this in your book, that there was this kind of a reputation for wariness of outsiders among folks in Iron Range. And I remember I sat in a bar in Chisholm later in the day. I just wanted to get a cold beer, and somehow I ended up with men on either side of me who were having a conversation, and they just talked around me for about half an hour as if I wasn’t even there. But after half an hour, one of them actually turned and started talking to me, and we had a nice conversation. Is that, first of all, one of the things that I love about visiting places is just connecting with people. So we’ll talk about sites next, but just in terms of places where you might be able to go to meet people and hang out. What do you what do you recommend on that front?
51:25
Yeah, well, you’ve you described an experience that I think a lot of people have had. It, it does take a little to break in to the local culture. There are places in this country and in this world where when you walk into a bar and you’re a stranger, there’s going to be someone who comes up and says “Hello, I don’t know you, what’s your name?” You know? And this is not one of those places. This is not how it works here. There’s a wariness, and there’s a historical I guess, reason for that, I think I always, I think I wrote this in the book. But the, you know, one of the things is new people, generally speaking, on the Range, meant new class, new groups of workers coming in to basically undercut the wages and well being of the community. So large influxes of people were usually seen as a bad thing, and that kind of persists in the culture to a much lesser degree. But it’s also, you know, like I said, in an individualistic kind of place, you know, you rely on yourself, maybe a little distrustful of new people, but it does, if you’re willing to take a little time, like half an hour, of sitting in between two people having a conversation, it does break down, and people realize, Oh, you’re okay, you’re not running away from me, so maybe we can talk now. And that’s that’s not unusual. So in terms of visiting the area, a lot of the tourist places, the places that cater to a lot of tourists, encourage conversations. If you go to say the Hull-Rust Mine view in North Hibbing, those volunteers and even a lot of the people you’ll meet there are chatty. They want to know where you’re from, and and they’ll tell the story, and you can share your own experiences too. And a lot of the museums and, you know, places of that nature are that way. But if you want to have that authentic experience, maybe go to, you know, a church supper or or like a local music event or something. You know, you might have to initially take the, you know, the approach of, if you want to know more about the area, talking to people, generally speaking, once you work past the nerves and the and the initial coolness, it’s a very worthwhile experience. And, you know, I’ve, I’ve kind of become like a, I don’t know, a cultural sherpa of sorts. I work in higher ed and journalism, and so I’m accustomed to meeting new people and visitors and travelers, and I kind of try to explain things, there are people like us around who are happy to help. And yeah, that’s I’d say, yeah, if you want to go to a bar, you know, there are certain bars that are different than others, but, you know, one of the classic things is to go into an Iron Range bar, like a Tom & Jerry’s in Chisholm, for instance. I don’t know if that was the bar you were in, but a place like that and sit and kind of take it in, you can kind of see what it’s like. You know, places in Hibbing are like that. You know, bars like Palmers or those kind of places. I mean, use your your Boomtown, which is kind of a little more catered in Hibbing to like the tourist crowd, and then you go to a place like Palmers, and you’ll see the difference. Just like next to the next to Boomtown, there’s a the Sportsman’s Cafe in Hibbing, and I always say that’s actually one of the oldest running restaurants that’s been continuously operated on the range. And if you go in there, you’re going to get an authentic local experience. And I can’t promise you exactly what that local experience will be, but it’ll be good food, and it’ll be authentic and, and, like, I think a lot of travelers like that kind of thing, so
Dean Klinkenberg 55:15
Absolutely.
Aaron Brown 55:16
Yeah. And so, you know, that’s, that’s, you know, just try to, try to look at where people are, you know, it’s, they’re not huge towns. There’s a lot of little towns on the Range and kind of go, go where the people are. And you can kind of take it in, you know. But I don’t know if you want to get into some of the my favorite spots to go, generally, I can give a few if you’re interested, but
Dean Klinkenberg 55:39
Sure, I wouldn’t turn that down.
Aaron Brown 55:40
Yeah, I have a lot of friends that I’m honor bound to mention. The Minnesota Discovery Center, formerly known as Iron World. It’s a museum, and it’s free nights are Thursday nights, and if you go in any other days, you can get in, and they’ve got quite a bit of the history, but also a nice grounds. They have concert series, and there’s different nights with live music and different things you can do if you check the website, but, but great place if you’re interested in research. No, not everybody is, but if you’re a former ranger, or if you have a relative from here you want to research your past, they have the Iron Range Research Center, which is a very great center for genealogy research and historical research of the region. But beyond that, there’s other mining museums, sort of Museum of Mining in Chisholm and Iron Range Historical Society in McKinley, and some other places around the region that are cool but you might if you’re looking for other stuff to do, places like Lake Ore-be-gone in Gilbert, you can go swimming and fishing and do all sorts of things in a very, very deep mine pit, and there’s a beach, and there’s different things you can do there. That’s kind of a classic spot to go. Going back to the Discovery Center, there’s actually the Redhead Bike Trail, mountain bikers. Actually, there’s a huge mountain biking I guess renaissance, or maybe not renaissance, but naissance, they’re turning a lot of the old mining dumps into bike trails. This was done down in the Cuyuna Range near Crosby and Ironton, that’s a huge mountain biking mecca, but they’re doing the same thing on parts of the Range. And really the epicenter now is the Redhead Bike Trail in Chisholm, and that’s a great mountain biking spot, if anybody is interested. And of course, Duluth is another big center. So you really come to northern Minnesota, you have Duluth, Crosby and Ironton and then Chisholm. You can mountain bike for days and really enjoy that. And of course, people walk the trails, and there’s hiking and and trail biking as well. The Mesabi Trail is 130 some miles long, and it runs from Grand Rapids. It’ll eventually run Grand Rapids to Ely, there are some spots where you can’t get through. They haven’t finished some trails yet. We just had flooding, and so there is some spots up near Tower that washed out, but they’re working on it. But there’s some great trails for biking, if that’s a thing that you enjoy. Golfing, of course, Giants Ridge is a premier golf course. I am not a golfer. I rather detest the sport, but it is. People tell me it’s very nice up there. And also at Giants Ridge, there’s a lot of resorts and things in that area. It’s kind of a rocky, interesting terrain, kind of area, one of the highest points on the Range, and so it’s a great spot. And then I think just the town of Ely all on its own. I don’t know if people want to go camping. If you’re interested in going into the Boundary Waters, that’s a real commitment, though. If you’re not quite committed to go rough it for a week, just spend a day or two in Ely or Grand Marais on the other side of the Boundary Waters. These are resort little towns. They’ll remind you kind of of a old movie about a tourist town, you know. And they’ve got shops and and cafes and and little things going on all the time and, and those are cool towns to go visit, in addition to all the, you know, the mining towns, the blue collar towns of the Range?
Dean Klinkenberg 56:16
Yeah, I’ve been rewatching Northern Exposure recently. Yeah, I feel like that could have been Ely.
59:28
Ely is, yeah, with the moose walking across the the street, that’s kind of an Ely experience. And Ely is got a lot of cool stuff happening. You know, it’s like any town, there are ups and downs, but they particularly in the summer, it’s just a neat little place to go visit, and there are a lot of attractions nearby and opportunities for outdoor recreation and camping and state parks. There’s a number of state parks easily within driving distance of any spot on the Range, and you can enjoy those as well.
Dean Klinkenberg 59:59
Yeah, yeah. And I know Ely. Well, I mean, maybe I’ll do a whole episode on Ely at some other time. But, you know, I remember going there with my, well, with with my husband, a few years back, and we were able to rent a canoe for a day to dip a toe into the Boundary Waters, basically. But there’s also the National Bear Center and the International Wolf Sanctuary, and so there’s a lot plenty to do around there. So let’s come back to mining for just a second. I don’t think this is the case anymore, but when I toured up there with my brother in 20, well, whatever year that was, a while back, we were able to take a mine tour from the Minnesota Discovery Center. I don’t think they’re doing that now post covid. But is there any place you could where folks could do a mine tour? ,
1:00:48
Yeah, they used to do tours of Hibbing Taconite out of the Discovery Center. I don’t think they’re doing them right now. Mining companies are big and tough and strong and very sensitive. So and and so they’ve, they’ve, it’s harder to get a tour for legal reasons. And it’s not that there’s anything horrific happening. It’s just that they worry very much that one of your little tourist photographs might happen to capture an accidental OSHA violation or something, and they don’t want to, and they don’t want to take the risk, not that that’s a concurrence, but so it’s harder to get a mine tour. Minntac, over in Mountain Iron, I think, still does tours, but you’d have to check me on that, but I Minntac used to do summer tours, though, I have to admit, I haven’t checked on that in a while. Minntac is one of the is the biggest iron mine in Minnesota and in, I think, North America. So you can, you can still take a look at that. I think they do weekly tours. You have to reserve in advance, because they do fill. If I recall the last time I checked into this, that was the case Hibbing Taconite I don’t think is doing tours right now, and part of that is the Hibbing Taconite has changed a lot. They’re they’re depleting their last of their current mine plan ore and they’re actually looking for new ore. So they’re exploring different corners that are property. And so I think things have changed a little on the grounds, and they’re just a little hesitant to have a lot of people around for that right now, but, but you know the thing about you might not get into a production plant, but you can get to these mine views on the edges of places like Virginia and Eveleth, Hibbing and and now you can drive on 169 between Chisholm And Hibbing, the main highway, and they’re mining right up to the edge of the highway. You probably get a better view driving by than you would from the mine view itself, just how that’s how close they are mining to the highway right now. So just being here, you’ll get a good glimpse of mining activity and what that looks like.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:02:57
Yeah, and I know a lot of people, when they drive through the area, they see the hills and the lakes and things, and they assume that this is just this beautiful landscape, but almost all of that is a result of mining. Right? The hills are piles of overburden, of rock that they couldn’t they didn’t have iron ore are like rubble. And then the lakes are often mines that have just filled back up with water, right?
1:03:21
Exactly, yeah, and something to consider for your, you know, I don’t know, 2112 travel plans, future people. You know, one day when the mines close, all of those mines are going to fill in with water. And in fact, is, you know, it’s pretty clear that there’s going to be a massive human made lake that span many, many miles across the region. Could be one, come instantly become one of the biggest lakes in Minnesota, a state known for big lakes. And so, you know, they’re all fighting the water table. They’re pumping out water at all hours to mine these, these pits. And so yeah, they fill in with water, and they’re very deep lakes. The water, contrary to what a lot of people think, is very clear, and it’s not like polluted mine water. If anything, it’s too clear, and makes for some challenges that way. But it’s for recreation it’s actually very suitable. And so that’s why you find paddle boarding and swimming, people who swim the mine pits and people who scuba dive, and people who use the pits. And of course, you stock them with fish, and people can go fishing. That’s you see a lot of that too.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:04:37
I have a I guess I like, I have a little of a flair for drama at times too. So I like monumental sculptures. I love the Iron Miner sculpture (editor’s note: Iron Man Memorial) in Chisholm, across the road from the Minnesota Discovery Center.
1:04:48
Yes, that that was the brainchild of Veda Ponikvar, the longtime editor of the newspapers in Chisholm. A couple of newspapers, Veda was the first woman to run a newspaper on the Range, and she did so in the late ’40s. And so, you know, really kind of a trailblazer, and was a major titan in local communities. And she it was her idea to kind of craft a massive sculpture honoring the iron mining past. And so the iron, the Iron Man is, is kind of a, kind of built to remind her her of her own father, I think, and and so was commissioned, and through a great process, of course, famously, I think, we got on Jay Leno because, or one of those shows, because the headline in the local paper was, I believe “Thousands gathered to see Iron Man erection.” And that was unfortunate, but, but very earnestly written.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:05:56
Right? Well,you know that would go viral today, for sure, wouldn’t it?
Dean Klinkenberg 1:06:06
I’m mindful of the time. I don’t want to keep you forever, but I kind of feel like I haven’t done my job if I haven’t asked you about Bob Dylan.
Aaron Brown 1:06:13
Yeah.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:06:14
So little Bobby Zimmerman spent much of his childhood in Hibbing and graduated from Hibbing High School. How? How can people connect to or people interested in learning more about his Hibbing or Iron Range years, how can people do that?
1:06:32
Yeah, well, we’ve never made it super easy, but it’s a it actually, in a way I think Dylan fans appreciate that it’s kind of a like an escape room. It’s a puzzle that when you get to town, there are clues everywhere. And so one of the nice things is that Dylan’s boyhood home in Hibbing on on Twenty, Twenty-fifth street and Seventh Avenue was purchased by premier Bob Dylan, memorabilia collector Bill Pagel, who has restored, or is in the process of restoring, but is largely in the exterior, restored the home to its original, you know, paint color and style, and he’s trying to replicate what that place looks like, and he put a historical plaque up. And so it’s, it’s a little easier to find and to enjoy the boyhood home. He’s not doing tours yet, but you know, you might find Bill, and if you, if you do, Bill will be happy to talk to you. And he knows quite a bit, both about the property and Dylan in general. There is a room if you actually one tour that I do recommend travelers take, that I didn’t mention is a tour of Hibbing High School, Bob Dylan’s High School. Not just because it’s Bob Dylan’s High School, though, if you’re a Dylan fan, that will be very interesting to you, but because it’s this historic, it was the world’s biggest and most expensive high school when it was built in 1921 and ’22 and I should say ’22 and ’23 and and it’s you can take the tours of the auditorium, which is based on a Broadway theater, Capitol Theatre, and, and you can see the stage and where Dylan during his high school talent show, had the curtain pulled on him when he was playing a rowdy Little Richard tune. And so you can literally stand on that stage and kind of look out and see how amazing this auditorium is. It doesn’t seem to belong in a little mining town, but also kind of feel the weight of maybe what Bob Dylan felt, and kind of experience some of that, maybe that rebelliousness and the but also the sense of tradition, the weight of the past that I think kind of haunts Dylan’s music. You can see that when you’re in Hibbing, you can you. And there’s walking tours. The library has a walking tour you can take to see some of the old sites, some of which are gone, some of which are are still there. And kind of picture and imagine Dylan’s world. There’s no museum. It’s not like that. They did erect a not a memorial, but like a piece of art commemorating Dylan’s Nobel Prize and his most famous lyrics, or most appropriate lyrics, I guess, on the back of this memorial thing. And it’s by the high school. So if you go to the high school, you can see that, and it’s, yeah, it’s kind of a little puzzle to unravel, but I like to go to North Hibbing. He talks about North Hibbing in his liner notes for “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” And up there he writes about it, and you can still see some of the streetscapes he describes in that poem in from 1961 and stand up in North Hibbing and think about the past, how they moved to town for the mine and all the drama that went with it. And Bob Dylan coming from here just a few years after that, and you can kind of get a sense of how a guy like Bob Dylan might come from a place like this.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:10:12
I think, yeah, I think visiting physically, visiting places like that, has an impact on me. I think it provides, like, a deeper sense of understanding or appreciation for the art that somebody created. I certainly felt some of that wandering around him the high school auditorium is unbelievable.
Aaron Brown 1:10:30
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:10:31
It would be a beautiful auditorium just about anywhere in the world. And to think that’s a high school in Hibbing is especially mind blowing. But that was compensation for moving the for moving north.
1:10:40
Yeah, it was part of the deal when they moved the town, the mines agreed to basically not fight the taxation involved in in building such a building. And actually there was a lot of conspirators on the mining side and on the unions and then the community, to basically get as much as they could out of this high school as they as possible. And it’s truly remarkable all that, and it’s held up. It’s been preserved. A lot of the local high schools have been torn down lately, but not Hibbing, because the community really puts their effort into preserving the history and the magnet, the grandeur of that high school.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:11:19
So I know at one time again, many years ago, I think you were the one who was running the Dylan Fest.
Aaron Brown 1:11:27
Yeah, Dylan Days.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:11:29
You had to give that up at some point, maybe because you had a family and far too many other things to do.
1:11:34
And then it slipped away over the years. Yeah, we closed we closed up shop. We just didn’t have the volunteer base that time. And shortly after we did, I think that was 2016 or ’15, or something like that. And shortly after that, a different group of volunteers formed the group that made the the statue project and and now there’s a very small event that they do every year, and they work closely with the Dylan Fest in Duluth, where Duluth is the birthplace, and Hibbing is where he grew up. And so if you are ever here in May, you can kind of take part in the Duluth events, and then come up to Hibbing and you get the whole picture.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:12:18
So the Duluth event is still going on?
Aaron Brown 1:12:21
Yeah, oh yeah, they do a big event in the week of his birthday, May, May 24 and usually around that time there’s events going on.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:12:30
So when I went, I got to go to the singer songwriter contest where people had to perform an original song and then a cover of a Dylan tune. Are they still doing that in Duluth?
1:12:40
Yeah, they still do a version. I don’t know what the rules are exactly, but they do a version of that same contest in Duluth. And they usually do some live music in Hibbing too. They don’t do a contest anymore, but those were kind of epic. We got some real like people who came from big distances just to try to win that thing. And so it was usually pretty impressive, some of the talent that came together for those.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:13:04
I have been blessed with the ability to travel a whole bunch and travel around the world, and that night in Hibbing for that singer songwriter contest is still one of my absolute favorite nights anywhere. So.
1:13:17
It was, it was a special thing we had going there, and it’s a little different now. But, you know, we find ways to, you know, create memories and interesting experiences. And that was, yeah, those, some of those, some of my favorite memories are from my time with that event too, because it was a lot of fun.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:13:36
Well, we probably ought to get back to doing the other work that we’re supposed to be doing today.
Aaron Brown 1:13:42
Yeah, this is fun.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:13:43
So I didn’t really, we didn’t talk at all, sort of about the present so much or the future. I know you had a really good discussion with Chuck Marohn on the Strong Towns Podcast talking about some of those challenges. I think I’ll just put a link to that in the show notes, and people should go listen to that for more of a sense of the struggles and the conversations around what’s going on in the Range these days. Where can people sort of follow what you’re up to and yeah, and tell them where they can buy Overburden?
1:14:13
Yeah. Well, Overburden is currently out of print, so if you have a copy, you’re doing pretty good, though. It is available at a number of libraries, and we’re going to be putting it back into print pretty soon I hope. My next book is “Power in the Wilderness.” I hope it comes out 2025 I say, I hope. I think it will. And actually the best place to follow what I’m up to, and either actual content or my links to my columns are all at MinnesotaBrown.com all all spelled out, @MinnesotaBrown on X slash Twitter or on Facebook and so. And that’s probably the best way to follow what I’m up to. And I’m producing at least one or two columns a week now. And so you’ll you’ll find some of today’s and yesterday’s most interesting stories there.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:15:04
Fantastic. Aaron, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Aaron Brown 1:15:07
Thanks, Dean, take care.
Dean Klinkenberg 1:15:11
Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to the series on your favorite podcast app so you don’t miss out on future episodes. I offer the podcast for free, but when you support the show with a few bucks through Patreon to help keep the program going, just go to patreon.com/DeanKlinkenberg. If you want to know more about the Mississippi River, check out my books. I write the Mississippi Valley Traveler guide books for people who want to get to know the Mississippi better. I also write the Frank Dodge mystery series that’s set in places along the river. Find them wherever books are sold. The Mississippi Valley Traveler Podcast is written and produced by me, Dean Klinkenberg. Original Music by Noah Fence. See you next time you
