On the invitation of friends who have a cabin that has been shared by the family for generations, Cutest and I motored north to just west of Hibbing, Minnesota, only 85 miles from the Canadian border. They were pretty surprised we actually came. So was Cutest.
My thoughts about this part of Minnesota have been that it contained their mottoed 10,000 lakes, plus fishing, hunting, more fishing and vampire mosquitoes.
Most of that is valid, but upper Minnesota, after it had been largely deforested, really became alive near the end of the 19th century due to mining. A long ridge of mainly iron ore runs through here and fueled by the monies from Morgans, Rockefellers, Carnegies and others, mining became THE source of income for the immigrants who moved here and labored in the mines.
In order to give the families who worked in the mines more reason to stay and mostly because they wanted the all the land on which the town stood because there was iron beneath it, the mining company invested over 4 million dollars, today equivalent to 41 million, to build and support one of the best schools in North America. Our bet is also that it is the only one that originally had railroad tracks built around it to haul materials in.
No expense was spared, whether it be the heating and cooling system, its marble and brass interior, its ornate auditorium that had a little company named Tiffany design and construct the exit and fire hose cabinet signs, or its indoor pool, or most importantly its staff of teachers. Its grandeur is unsurpassed and it's now on the National Registrar.
The school, now a hundred and one years old, looks as fresh and clean as the day it was built. Alumni who still live in the area happily return for reunions and our guide who was a 1965 graduate and now the school’s retired maintenance supervisor, leads visitors on a behind-the-scene tour of the school.
Hibbing is a community of only 27,000. The most recent high school graduating class will be fewer than 200, down from a class in the ‘70s that numbered over 400. The town is quite friendly, proud of their mining history and rightfully boastful of the magnificent high school and Bob Dylan, né Bobby Zimmerman, who graduated from here.
So leave your fishing and hunting gear at home (or bring it) and come on up to experience one of our country’s most beautiful and varied lands. It’s an eight hour car drive north on primarily I-35 that has good roads and many rest areas. Cutest and I oohed and awed about the fall foliage and quaint Norman Rockwell type villages we drove through on the way up. You should consider a trip up here – you’ll be glad you did. And there were no mosquitoes.
And did I mention several nights of the Northern Lights (aureola borealis) and the brightest stars in the darkest sky you ever did see?
It's a little hard to see the arrow > on the right but it's worth it to find it. And all those white dots are stars.
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