Published November 18, 2007 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune

Highway 63 Revisited

By Aaron J. Brown

They say the Iron Range is entering a modern age, a time of renaissance and progress and probably even fancier words that will be invented when the new noun factory opens just outside Buhl. I have seen proof that this is true but it has nothing to do with our impending new steel plant or nonferrous minerals. We’ve seen economic booms before, followed by busts and more booms. No, the proof of the modern age may be found on the highway from Hibbing to the locations.

Locations exist as one of the most interesting details you’ll see on the Range. These small clusters of older, often symmetrical houses seem to orbit around our towns, especially here in Hibbing – still the Range’s largest town. Unlike the suburbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul these locations don’t hug the city limits, allowing drivers to pass the border unaware. Locations lie about a mile or more beyond their parent town on the other side of thick forests of trees and vast mines. Visitors may believe they are entering a new town – one with no apparent commerce, zoning regulations or organized government or any kind. In truth, they enter a location. A place, yes, but not a town.

Locations formed around fast-growing mining operations at a time when there was no reliable means of public or personal transportation. Mine owners deemed it best for workers to live right at the mouth of the mine where access to drink, stores and union organizers could be controlled. Companies quickly built these locations, assigning homes to the mostly immigrant workers who extracted the iron ore by pick, shovel and hand.

As you drive west out of Hibbing proper you pass through Kerr Location, Leetonia Location and eventually Kelly Lake. In other directions maps show evidence of older locations like Redore and Carson Lake, where former Gov. Rudy Perpich and his family grew up, though mining activity has largely covered or blasted away their footprints.

I have always been fascinated by the location that once surrounded the ruins of the old Dupont blasting powder factory by Carey Lake east of Hibbing. The factory reportedly blew up one day, creating the charred remains you can still see on the shore of the city’s publicly owned lake. Surviving residents relocated their location homes but left the foundations of a town that has since been absorbed by nature. I’ve been geocaching out there. You know, where you find little goodie bags in the woods using a global positioning system. Yeah, we’re modern now.

I work in Hibbing but I live in the woods of Itasca County. There are two ways home; both take about half an hour if you don’t encounter taconite trains or bad roads. The first most obvious way is to take the freeway to Nashwauk and head north. My favorite way is to take Highways 63, 79 and 39, slipping stealthily into Itasca through Kerr and Leetonia locations and across the guts of Hibbing Taconite. I don’t know of any drive that better shows the scars and beauty of the Iron Range.

They rerouted Highway 63 this summer. A drive that once included several 90 degree turns within a few feet of people’s front porches now bends widely around the locations, allowing increased speed and decreased awareness of these little towns that are not towns, not exactly.

On the old commute my cell phone would always fly off the passenger seat of my car when I hit a turn too fast (in other words, daily), roll around with the Diet Coke cans on the floor before I rescued it in time to avoid the oncoming traffic – usually a truck with the diver’s name somehow affixed to a bug shield on the hood. I would momentarily flash back to the time when the roads were built, when mining trucks would rumble up the streets and no one used turn signals. It was a dangerous time, but too new and exciting for anyone to know exactly how dangerous. Though I am a very modern Iron Ranger, complete with iPod and e-mail, the perilous turns on Highway 63 taught me what one can only learn in the shadows of these aging location houses. Not that long ago, Iron Rangers did not log on; they sawed logs. They did not mine data; they mined iron. And though these early Iron Rangers could have avoided many conflicts with the powerful moneyed interests that built the locations where they were told to live, they instead fought for fair wages, safer working conditions and schools, schools, schools. Schools that taught me most of what I know.

This new route is safer and I welcome it, but I hope we remember the teachings of the old route as we pass the locations from a distance. As we all drive faster on this modern artery of progress may we also remember all that is good about a life of hard work in a hard place.

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