Proctor: Iron Ore Capital of the Rails
Near Duluth, Minnesota
Proctor exists because of iron ore. In eighteen ninety-one the Merritt brothers built the Duluth, Missabe and Northern Railway to carry ore from Minnesota's Iron Range to Lake Superior. They needed a massive sorting yard at the edge of Duluth, and the village was incorporated in eighteen ninety-four as Proctorknott, named for James Proctor Knott, the Kentucky congressman who gave a famous satirical speech mocking Duluth.
Workers here classified and assembled thousands of ore cars heading to the docks. By the early nineteen forties, Proctor was widely described as one of the largest iron-ore sorting yards in the world. Today the railroad is gone but the town remains, a quiet hillside community overlooking Duluth and the western tip of Lake Superior.
