Esko: Finnish Roots on the Road to Duluth
Near Duluth, Minnesota
The community of Esko, sitting just off Interstate Thirty-Five between Cloquet and Duluth, takes its name from a general store. Alex Esko, a Finnish immigrant, built Esko's Corner in nineteen nineteen, and the cluster of homes and farms around it gradually adopted the name. The area had been settled since the eighteen seventies and eighties, mostly by waves of Finnish, Norwegian, and Swedish immigrants who came to work the timber and farming country of Carlton County.
The name was shortened to Esko in nineteen thirty-five, making it official. Today the Esko Historical Society maintains an open-air museum with original and reproduction buildings from the late eighteen hundreds. The community is a small but enduring marker of the Scandinavian and Finnish immigration that shaped this stretch of northeastern Minnesota.
