The Mesabi and the Ore Docks
Near Duluth, Minnesota
In eighteen ninety, a prospector named Leonidas Merritt and his six brothers tramped across the Mesabi Range, a long, low ridge of ancient rock in northeastern Minnesota, and found iron ore close enough to the surface to scoop with a shovel. They called it soft ore. The geologists who examined it called it hematite.
The railroads and steel companies who came running called it a fortune. The Mesabi ore was different from the iron deposits that had been mined elsewhere. It lay in open-pit seams, not underground veins.
Steam shovels could strip the overburden and load ore directly into rail cars. Within a decade, the Mesabi Range was producing more iron ore than any place on earth. Trains ran south and east from the range, descending to the docks at Duluth and its neighbor Two Harbors.
There, ore poured from trestle-mounted pockets into the holds of Great Lakes freighters in quantities that would have seemed impossible a generation before. The ore docks at Duluth are still among the most striking industrial structures in the American Midwest. They rise thirty-five feet above the waterline and stretch as long as a quarter mile, their pockets timed to drop ore in precise sequences so a freighter loads evenly without capsizing.
At peak operation in the mid-twentieth century, a single ship could take on twenty thousand tons of ore in under two hours. J. P.
Morgan bought out John D. Rockefeller's interest in the Mesabi properties in nineteen oh one and folded them into United States Steel, at the time the largest corporation in American history. The Duluth waterfront became the funnel through which American industrial civilization poured.
Carnegie's Pennsylvania furnaces, the I-beams of skyscrapers rising in Chicago and New York, much of it began as red dirt scraped from a Minnesota hillside and shipped south through the cold blue waters of Gichigami. The Mesabi Range still produces iron ore in a processed form called taconite pellets. The open pits near Hibbing and Virginia are so large they are visible from space.
They are among the oldest active industrial landscapes in North America, and the ore docks at Duluth still receive shipments in season, right on the waterfront where you are now.
