Old family photo reveals how much has changed on Iron Range

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At a recent rainy summer reunion, my great aunt slapped a stack of old photos I’d never seen before on the kitchen table next to the dessert bars.

In one photograph, a man in his 50s stares at some fixed point in the distance. The future, perhaps, but more likely some piece of equipment. He wears a hard hat, prescription safety glasses, a rumpled work shirt and high-waisted pants rolled up at the cuffs. His breast pockets stretch taut with pens, pencils and small instruments necessary to the work of a mining engineer. Even in black and white, I see how the red iron ore stains his boots.

This man is my great-grandfather, Ward Brown. I never knew him. I was told that after I was born, just before he died, he held me in his bony arms and said hello. In this picture, he is strong, captain of one of the last underground mines near Crosby, Minn., on the Cuyuna Iron Range.

The year is 1957. The mine gapes open behind him, yet still just a relative pinhole at the bottom of the massive Pennington Mine pit. Crisscrossed boards mark 20-foot steel bolts that support the drift blasted into greenschist rock. Inside, blue-gray ore spills out like candy from a curb-stomped piñata.

One of the men working in the background is my grandfather, Ward Jr., whose young son — my father, Ward III — was learning to walk just a couple miles away. The picture can’t show this, but the mine quickly grew into a dangerous cavern, bigger than an opera house, as ore kept falling from the back. They got as much as they could before it collapsed. My grandfather never knew if it made much money, which means it almost certainly did not.

The photograph recorded a brief moment in a historical maelstrom. Soon, the Pennington closed for good. When the pumps stopped, the pit filled with water. (My great-grandfather’s mine now rests more than 100 feet under what is now the Cuyuna Country State Recreation Area.) So the Browns went home to the Mesabi Range to chase the foolish notion that they might master metal for good.

My family speaks the language of machines. In the patois of an owner’s manual, my father and grandfather tell profane tales of overhauled transmissions and two-day drives into the maw of a blizzard where diesel fuel turns into jelly.

My grandfather tells a story about fixing a pump deep in an underground mine at Ely, Minn. Water rises, first past his ankles and then past his knees. Failure meant death. Even 65 years later, he can recite the technical specifications of the mechanism that prevented his drowning.

My father worked briefly at Eveleth Taconite, long enough to whip doughnuts with a 200-ton haul truck and to join thousands of others in the unemployment lines of the 1980s.

In these tales, the long story of Minnesota’s Iron Range region takes shape. It is a scrapbook of change.

A wave of immigrants crashed against the embankment of American capitalism, then swelled to bend what it could not break. Sacrifice and lost lives defined the first generation, but surviving children used their education and wages to claw prosperity from poverty.

That is, until the natural ore mines began to close in the 1950s. Thousands left — Bob Dylan among them. But then, technology performed a miracle, creating taconite mines to process lower grade ores. A miracle indeed, until the next miracle ramped up plant efficiency, reducing the mining workforce to a tenth of its past glory.

Pay is better. Jobs are safer. In many ways, mining is a more desirable career than it’s ever been. There’s plenty left in the ground. It’s just never going to create enough jobs to restore what was lost.

The United States Steel Corporation made the modern Iron Range, its Oliver Iron Mining Company once ruling over local affairs like a provincial governor. The unions fought back, but not as hard as the competition.

Once the world’s largest corporation, U.S. Steel now holds a wisp of its previous market share. Late last year, the company agreed to a $14.9 billion deal to merge with Nippon Steel of Japan. That’s almost three times less than Elon Musk paid for Twitter the previous year. And yet thousands of Iron Rangers wait for news, not knowing how this will go. We never do.

When my great-grandfather was born, livery stables dotted the streets of the Iron Range. After cars came, garages were called auto liveries so people would understand what they were. By the end of his life, the internet was gestating in a college laboratory.

Today’s Iron Range isn’t like the past. Health care professionals outnumber miners. We have more open jobs than people; opportunities abound, though you will not hear that from most. The strong DFL politics of my youth washed red with the rise of right-wing populism, a trend that will likely continue for the foreseeable future.

But the future is only foreseeable for so long. I would not have predicted that my teenage son would gather with online friends from around the world to watch “Columbo” every Saturday night, but he does. My iPhone waits to join my great-grandfather’s slide rule in Valhalla.

There are those who say the world is changing too much, that we need to govern our lives by some half-imagined nostalgia. But the force of change is nothing that can be stopped.

That is why I still find comfort in the language of machines. No machine is permanent or infallible. Grit in the gears, bad gas, heat and friction do all manner of damage. The meaning of life is to make it run better, to keep it in order, and to leave it in some decent condition so another generation may yet hear the engines hum.