The Mesabi Range: Iron Ore and Steel

In eighteen ninety, a prospector named Leonidas Merritt was leading a search party through the pine-covered ridges of northeastern Minnesota when his crew found what he and his brothers had been searching for for years. The Merritt family had heard the geological stories, that there was iron in the low hills north of Duluth, in the formation the Ojibwe called Misaabe, meaning giant. The Merritts had spent years prospecting, and in November of eighteen ninety they finally confirmed commercial-grade ore near what became the town of Mountain Iron.

The Mesabi Range was not like the iron ore deposits the industry had worked in Michigan and Pennsylvania. It was not hard rock that had to be blasted and hoisted from underground shafts. It was soft, crumbly hematite ore that lay close to the surface in a deposit a hundred and ten miles long and one to three miles wide. You could move it with steam shovels. Open-pit mining at industrial scale was immediately possible in a way that underground mining never was.

The Merritts began developing the range and shipping ore through the new port at Duluth, and then they ran out of money during the financial panic of eighteen ninety-three and sold their interests to John D. Rockefeller, who later transferred them to J.P. Morgan's United States Steel Corporation, organized in nineteen-oh-one as the first billion-dollar corporation in American history. The Mesabi ore was a central asset.

By the early twentieth century, the open pits on the Mesabi Range were producing roughly sixty percent of all iron ore mined in the United States. The ore traveled by rail to the docks at Duluth and Two Harbors and Superior, loaded into ore boats that carried it through the Great Lakes to the steel mills of Pittsburgh and Gary and Cleveland. The steel that built the American industrial twentieth century, the skyscrapers, the automobiles, the naval fleet, the bridges, started as red dirt in northeastern Minnesota.

The Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine near Hibbing grew to be one of the largest open-pit iron mines in the world. Hibbing itself was literally moved to allow for mining expansion, a block at a time, starting in nineteen nineteen and continuing into the nineteen twenties. The high-grade ore was largely exhausted by the nineteen fifties, but new processing technology using taconite, a lower-grade iron ore mixed in hard rock that was long considered worthless, extended the range's productive life by decades.