Most tours involve active businesses and rugged outdoor industrial areas. Hard-soled shoes and long pants are required. Hardhats and safety glasses are required for many of the tour sites and will often be provided by the host site. Members owning such safety equipment are encouraged to bring it along. Hardhats and safety glass are available to purchase as part of registration.
The underground mine tour at Soudan will be damp and chilly. Please dress accordingly.
SELECT TOUR FOR MORE INFORMATION
BREWERY TOUR
Leaving the hotel at 11:30 the tour will first visit the former Fitger's brewery. The 1881 structure is now a shopping, hotel and entertainment complex. Second stop will be Lake Superior Brewing Co., a modern microbrewery, where we'll be able to sample some of the product. We are planning to have a brewery historian along for the ride to provide commentary.
Beginning with a 1:00 slide show at the hotel,
this tour will proceed to the waterfront for a look at the sculptures
installed there. It will end with a stop at a sculptor's studio
for a discussion of the process involved in getting one of these
works from idea to final product.
Thursday, June 1, 2000 Welcome Reception
The conference kicks off with a reception at 6:30 p.m. in the Great Hall of the 1892 French Chatequesque Depot across the street from the Radisson. After food and drink, a presentation by Pat Labadie, Director of the Canal Park Marine Museum and tugboat captain, will acquaint us with Duluth's history. The Lake Superior Railroad Museum downstairs will be open late to allow us to view such rail artifacts as the oldest known rotary snowplow.
All Friday tours include continental breakfast at the Radisson to ensure on time departure. This is included in your tour fee and does not require staying at the Radisson.
Our tour day begins in Two Harbors, MN and the steam-powered coal-fired Edna G. Built by the Cleveland Ship Building Company at Cleveland, OH in 1896, it has its original steam engine with a 1948 boiler.
Up the shore we visit Split Rock Lighthouse, constructed in 1910 before roads penetrated the north shore. All materials used were delivered by boat and lifted up the steep rocky cliffs of Lake Superior. Restored to its 1920s appearance the lighthouse, fog-signal building and restored keeper's dwelling give a glimpse of life in this once remote and still spectacular setting.
We then leave the shore and travel to Hoyt Lakes and the LTV Steel Mining Company. An in-depth tour of the modern-day taconite mining operation will include mining, crushing, separating, concentrating, mixing, pelletizing, and shipping. On site equipment includes diamond-bit rotary drills, hydraulic shovels and loaders, water wagons, production trucks and heavy-duty conveyors.
Our last tour is Partridge River, Inc., a manufacturer of wood products that are used in a variety of finished items, including furniture and kitchen cabinets. The 50,000 square foot plant operates around the clock, five days a week, using kiln-dried rough lumber from Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.
ASV designs, builds and markets the Posi-Track, an all-season, rubber-tracked vehicle used primarily in construction, agriculture and landscaping. Founded in 1983 by Gary Lemke, one of the top snowmobile dealers in the nation, and Edgar Heteen, founder of Polaris and Arctic Cat.
Next we roll into Blandin Paper Company, one of North America's largest producers of lightweight, coated publication-grade paper. It operates four paper machines, some of which date back to the 1930s, with an annual capacity of 500,000 tons. Limited tour size will require rotation between Blandin and ASV.
Next we will stomp in the red ore dust of the historic Hill Annex Mine. Here we will see the heavy media plant and railroad shops of a mine, which produced iron ore so rich it could be shipped to eastern steel mills with almost no processing. It was begun in 1912 by James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad's subsidiary, Arthur Iron Mining Company.
The National Steel pelletizing plant will demonstrate the process of turning low-grade iron ore into pellets. Many of these pellets find themselves melting in the blast furnaces of National Steel's Great Lakes Division steel mill near Detroit, Michigan.
From a viewing platform we'll see the Hull Rust Mahoning Mine, the world's biggest open pit at over 3 miles in length, 2 miles in width and 535 feet in depth. Begun in 1895, it embraces more than 50 individual mines. Today, the Hibbing Taconite Co. works the northern perimeter, expanding the "Grand Canyon of the North."
Hibbing Electronics was recently acquired by Reptron Corporation, and changed its name K-Byte Hibbing Manufacturing. The company manufactures and designs a wide range of products from simple to complex board assemblies as well as box build for telecom, medical, banking, industrial, networking and computer industries, to name just a few. K-Byte is a full-service electronic contract manufacturing company, ranking in the Top 50 Contract Manufactures, according to results for the annual MMI (Manufacturing Market Insider) Top 50 list of the world's largest EMS providers for 1998.
Minnesota's first underground mine, the Soudan, began as an open-pit mine for non-magnetic hematite in 1884 and was converted to an underground operation in the 1890s. When the mine closed in 1963, U.S. Steel Corporation donated it to the state and it is currently a state park. The hard-hat tour begins in the elevator cage that descends 2,400 feet into the earth on 1880s hoisting machinery. An open-car mine train provides transportation into the last and deepest area mined.
Spend your lunchtime sipping root beer under the red pines at the Dorothy Molter Museum in Ely. Known as the "Root Beer Lady", the 23-year-old Chicago nurse became enamored with the boundary waters wilderness in 1930. She came to stay in 1934 and until her death in 1986, she opened her doors to paddlers from all over the world, annually dispensing between 11,000 and 12,000 bottles of homemade root beer to the nearly 6,000 visitors who stopped at her remote cabin near the Minnesota-Ontario boarder.
When Paul Schurke, Will Steger and Ann Bancroft made their famous dogsled expedition to the North Pole in 1986, they were wearing cold-weather apparel made by Paul's wife, Susan. Sue Schurke has translated her sewing skills into a thriving Ely-based industry. Using the fleece of former soda pop bottles she makes anoraks, windproof shirts and pants, and signature expedition hats, at her Wintergreen Northwoods Apparel factory, the next stop on the tour.
On the north side of Ely, a tour of buildings from the Pioneer Mine will close our tour. After 78 years of producing ore from the richest underground vein in Minnesota, it closed in 1967. The underground mine operations employed approximately 600 miners to produce 1,000,000 tons annually, as opposed to the open pit mines which produced about five times the annual tonnage with only about 100 workers. We may be able to climb the headframe here.
FRIDAY DULUTH TOUR 1: BIG STEEL, FROM BOATS TO BRIDGES
We will board the floating museum William A. Irvin to start our day. Once the flagship of the USS Great Lakes Fleet, she was built in 1938 by the American Shipbuilding Company for the Pittsburgh Steamship Company, a U.S Steel division. Retired in 1978, she hauled taconite and coal in her three separate holds. A 2000 horsepower steam turbine engine powered the 610-foot 9-inch long boat. Known as the "The Pride of the Silver Stackers", she was designed to carry VIP passengers in elegant splendor with staterooms paneled in walnut, plush carpeting, fireplaces, and a private dining room and sun deck. Retired sailors will lead the tours.
Over a million square feet of steel in Minnesota's second longest bridge (7,980 feet) supports our next stop. Rising above the Saint Louis River, the Blatnick Bridge, covered in 15,000 gallons of paint and illuminated with 236 lights, took three years and $21 million to build. It was opened in 1961, replacing the 1897 Interstate Bridge, a section of which survives today.
Originally completed in 1905 as an aerial transfer bridge, the next bridge carried up to 62.5 tons in a gondola on cables across the 300-foot wide ship canal that severed Minnesota Point from Duluth in 1871. Due to traffic demands, it was converted to a lift bridge in 1930, incorporating many of the original structural elements. The Aerial Lift Bridge has recently undergone a major rehabilitation, reopening to ship traffic on March 22. A speaker from the Corps of Engineers will tell attendees about the construction history and rehabilitation.
In the shadow of the Aerial Lift Bridge, the Canal Park Marine Museum displays a large collection of historic artifacts including a whaleback anchor, a capstan and propeller, an Army Corps of Engineers tugboat and Great Lakes freighter pilothouse. Its location adjacent to the ship canal offers excellent boat watching.
Gary, Minnesota, after its namesake in Indiana and US Steel's Chairman of the Board Judge Elbert Gary, is home to Morgan Park, our next stop. Planned to the then perceived "pecularities" of the Duluth area labor force, construction began in 1913. Known during construction as "The Model City", the name was changed to honor the late J.P. Morgan, and was ready for residents in March of 1914. Homes were constructed from concrete block and stucco with a "bomb shelter quality" along curved streets which reflected the surrounding natural features. Attendees will be treated here to a presentation on the history of steelmaking in the area, although the plant this town served is long gone.
We will squeeze onto the 24-foot wide plank roadway of the Oliver Bridge as it crosses Spirit Lake, a widening of the Saint Louis River. Authorized by an Act of Congress in 1908, the double-decked bridge is 2,189 feet in length with a 300-foot draw span that may have never opened to allow boats access to the upper reaches of the Saint Louis River. The top deck still carries freight trains on the one remaining
track. Sometime during 2000, the bridge will be closed to vehicle traffic for installation of a new concrete roadway and new steel support structure. We're hoping to get there ahead of the start of the SHPO-approved rehab project.
M.E. International began supplying impact and abrasion resistant materials (the teeth in the grinder) to Iron Range taconite mills from their plant in New Duluth in 1978. With a capacity of 60,000 castings a year, their specialties include a dry sand vacuum molding system and complete in-house heat treating facilities for annealing, normalizing, tempering and oil or water quenching. Castings range in size from 200 to 5,000 pounds with yearly plant production at 27,500 tons. A labor strike should be resolved by the time of our visit and we have been assured of safe conduct through a delivery entrance, but please consider the possibility of crossing a picket line in selecting this tour.
Attendees will have a choice between the GP and LSPI tours.
Witness papermaking from start to finish at Lake Superior Paper Industries. This 1987 mill produces 243,000 tons of supercalendered glossy paper per year on its 393-foot long, 30-foot wide, 32-foot high German-built Voith paper machine. Moving at 4,500 feet per minute, 760 tons are produced daily using Minnesota and Wisconsin balsam and spruce pulp. Nearby company-owned Hibbard Station provides all the steam needed to operate the mill by burning a variety of fuels, including waste bark and wood chips. LSPI is a division of Consolidated Papers. LSPI requests no visitors under age 10.
As one of Georgia-Pacific Corporation's 400 North American facilities, this plant produces hardboard using a wet process of grinding wood chips into a fiber and forming a mat in a water slurry. Both a 1955 and 1976 hardboard press squeeze this slurry of ground chips bone dry forming 16-foot boards of various thicknesses.
The tour then heats up at the Duluth Steam Cooperative, a Duluth landmark since 1932. Supplying 150 psi steam to 225 downtown buildings through two miles of high pressure lines, the four Edge Moor 100,000-pound-per-hour steam boilers burn pulverized Powder River Basin Western coal with Eastern coal used as a cold weather supplemental fuel. Two of the boilers are equipped to burn natural gas when needed.
We'll travel along highway 210, the former route of the St. Paul and Duluth Railroad, for drive-by views of several hydroelectric dams, including Minnesota Power's Thomson Station, on the St. Louis River. Lunch will be in Jay Cooke State Park. The park was established in 1915 with a donation of land from the St. Louis River Power Company. We hope to have a speaker tell us more about the dams over lunch. On our way to Cloquet, we'll go through the town of Carlton where the Northern Pacific began building westward on February 15, 1870.
Known as the Northwest Paper Company in 1898, the present-day Potlatch Corporation will show us the process of making 197,000 tons of pulp annually at their Cloquet mill. This mill also produces paper and together with a second Minnesota mill they output 35,700 tons of paper, including the paper you are holding. Species like birch, maple and basswood are used to meet the growing demand for coated papers and Potlatch also produces 2.5 million genetically modified seedlings at their Cloquet nursery for private and public use.
There will be a choice between Diamond Brands and US Gypsum
Next, find your match at Diamond Brands, the largest US manufacturer of wooden matches, toothpicks and clothespins. The friction match company was founded in 1881 and used birch and aspen wood to help supply the million match a day demand. Today, one tree can produce 2.2 million penny match splints (without the flammable tip) and the company can make 4.5 million penny matches an hour.
*****ADDED DRIVE-BY SITE***** We'll be starting extra early to drive by the Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range Railroad shops in Proctor, Minnesota. We were unable to arrange a tour, but a panaromic view of the yards is available from U.S. Highway 2.
The familiar story of two brothers and an airplane will be repeated at Cirrus Design Corporation. Founded in 1984 by Alan and Dale Klapmeier, the company began by building kit airplanes, went on to land contracts with NASA to introduce the popular personal aircraft called the Cirrus SR20. The new plane utilizes composite materials in its airframe and the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System that can be deployed to safely land a disabled aircraft.
The Connor's Point terminal elevator operated by Peavey, now the grain trading division of ConAgra, the largest U.S. flour miller. The silos can be filled with a variety of wheat, as well as soybeans, corn and sunflower seeds before being shipped to Buffalo, N.Y., for milling. The complex was built in the mid-1960's by the Chicago and North Western Railroad and leased to Continental Grain.
Got coal? At the 200-acre Superior Midwest Energy Terminal, 7 million tons is in storage at any one time, supplied by two 123-unit coal trains that travel 1,000 miles from the Powder River and Hanna Basins. Commissioned in 1976 to supply Detroit Edison Company power plants in Michigan, the trains are unloaded at 4,000 tons per hour and the ships can be loaded at 11,500 tons per hour to supply about 10 millions tons to DEC annually.
Lunch will be a whale of a good time at the S.S. Meteor Maritime Museum, home to the world's last surviving whaleback freighter. Launched from Captain Alexander McDougall's American Steel Barge Company shipyards in 1896, the design-patented "barge" was returned to her home port of Superior, Wis., in 1972 to be used as a museum. The Meteor and her 43 sister ships hauled ore, grain, sand and automobiles during her 75 years afloat and visitors will see her in her last conversion as an oil tanker.
The Twin Ports' largest taconite transshipment facility will thunder with two billion-year old Mesabi ore during our next tour. Owned by the BN-SF Railroad, the 23-year-old plant was built in the Superior Belgian neighborhood of Allouez to accommodate thousand-foot ore boats. Produced at Hibbing Taconite and National Steel, the Iron Range pellets are carried a distance of 3.5 miles from the unloader to the lakeside silos on a network of conveyors 12 miles long.
Dinner is on your own. For those attending the Glensheen tour, we will have a list of nearby restaurants that will help you obtain sustenance in time to board the bus.
Shuttle buses will leave the Radisson at 7:00 & 7:20 for a tour of Glensheen, a lavish 39-room Jacobean Revival mansion built between 1905 and 1908, now a historic site operated by the University of Minnesota. It was the site of the infamous 1977 murder of Elisabeth Congdon.
The traditional forum for sharing your latest
IA discovery or research in progress will be from 8:00 to 11:00
at the Radisson.
The day will be spent at the Radisson for paper
sessions and the Annual Business Meeting, which will, as usual,
happen over lunch. A continental breakfast will be available in
the morning. The evening's banquet will be at the St. George Serbian
Orthodox Church in New Duluth. Built in 1923, it has a unique
icon screen with a life-size oil painting on canvas by renowned
Duluth artist David Ericson. A tour of the church will be conducted
between dinner and dancing. The menu selections will be Serbian
in nature and will include sarma (cabbage rolls). Music will be
provided by the Duluth Klezmer Band.
DOWNTOWN ARCHITECTURAL WALKING TOUR
***THIS TOUR IS SOLD OUT*** Leaving the Radisson at 9:00 a.m, this tour will take in some of the splendid turn-of-the-century buildings that celebrated the "triumph of technology and civilization over wilderness and the elements." The guide, Jill Fischer, is a former city planner involved in historic preservation. This tour is scheduled to end at 11:00 a.m.
Boarding will begin at noon for a 12:30 cruise of the Duluth/Superior harbor and its facilities including grain elevators and ore docks. Eric Bonow, now a relief mate on Great Lakes freighters with many years of experience on tugs and ferries as well as freighters, is a history major at the University of Wisconsin-Superior. He has worked on a number of historical projects related to the Duluth/Superior harbor and will be providing narration on the history and structures of the waterfront. Lunch will be eaten on board. The boat will return to dock at 2:00 p.m.
Leaving at 10:30 a.m. from the Depot in Duluth, this vintage train, including the last two Burlington Northern passenger coaches and a 1918 Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range passenger coach, operated by the Lake Superior Railroad Museum will head north to Two Harbors where we are hoping to have a guided tour of abandoned DMIR round house and shops. Box lunches will be served en route. Return to Duluth is scheduled for 4:30 p.m.
Departing at 7:30 a.m., a return to the Soudan Mine is planned with a more extensive tour than that on Fri. The University of Minnesota's underground proton decay detector facility, MINOS, will be included. The afternoon will be spent at the International Wolf Center in Ely where we'll get a behind-the-scenes introduction to the radio technology used in wolf tracking. This will include a demonstration and hands-on use of radio collars. On board the bus to and fro we'll have a speaker on the history of mining and another speaker from the Arrowhead Association on the history of recreational development Scheduled time for return to Duluth is 6:00 p.m. Bus will make a stop at the airport upon return, if needed.