The story behind Minnesota’s abandoned mining town of Taconite Harbor

TACONITE HARBOR, Minn. — If you’ve never heard of the town of Taconite Harbor, it may be because it no longer exists.

“There’s still a light pole here. And this was the main street,” said Skip Lamb, pointing to a street that nature has slowly reclaimed. “There were just mowed lawns here and this is where all the people lived.”

From the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s, the community of Taconite Harbor flourished. There were about 20 homes as well as a town hall, a fire station, and even a school with sports teams.

A basketball court that once marked the center of the city still exists today.

Lamb was once a little league coach in Taconite Harbor. Today he is a historian of a time when things used to be that way. The town’s history goes like this: A pier was built around two nearby islands on Lake Superior to protect boats that were hauling iron ore.

“Then they needed a city to house the people they would manage. And they had to build houses because there was no housing here. They built the whole city,” Lamb said.

Many residents worked at the loading dock, shipping taconite pellets to the East Coast during the boom. Ten million tons of taconite a year came out of the city. Then came the bust. In the early 1980s, the industry reached an all-time low, forcing many families to move away and find work elsewhere.

“This is part of the Iron Range saga. Towns are being abandoned, cleared, houses relocated,” Lamb said.

After the residents moved away, a real estate developer bought the houses, moved them and sold them off piece by piece. By the early 1990s, they were gone. A decade later, the dock was also abandoned.

“We feel very committed to telling the rest of the story about Taconite Harbor,” said Steve Schug.

In the nearby town of Schroeder, Taconite Harbor lives on.

“It was once the fastest ore loading facility on the Great Lakes,” Schug said.

Schug is president of the Cross River Heritage Center, which is hosting an exhibition this summer to honor the abandoned port city.

“We hold regular Taconite Harbor meetings here at the Heritage Center, and a lot of people come for that,” Schug said.

The exhibition shows the highs and lows of the community’s history. For example, taconite dust once colored many things red. This included fresh laundry hanging on clotheslines.

“I had a laundromat. I needed three washing machines just to wash red clothes,” Lamb said.

There was also a train accident in which over 90 cars loaded with taconite derailed. Fortunately, no one was seriously injured. But for the people who once lived and prospered here, the good memories far outweigh the bad.

“It’s important for people to understand that it was a viable community, a city,” Lamb said. “It was a great place to live and it was a great place for these kids to grow up.”

You can still visit part of the abandoned Taconite Harbor on the north shore.