I'm here in Hibbing, Minnesota, and behind me is Bob Dylan's childhood home.

Now, that's not the reason for this visit, but it is something cool to see if you're in town.

No, the reason I'm here in Hibbing today is because just over a century ago, this entire city picked itself up and moved two miles down the road.

Why, you might ask?

Well, the answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind.

This is a tale of iron ore, American industrialization and sheer human willpower.

You see, I found myself in Minneapolis this summer, and I couldn't pass up the opportunity to come up here to the North Country too.

I saw Lake Superior this morning.

It's beautiful.

And now I'm here in this seemingly unimportant little town in the middle of Minnesota's Mesabi Iron Range.

But it's not a complete unknown.

Both Hibbing and the Mesabi Iron Range have played a huge role in American history.

And today, I'm going to tell you just part of that story.

Im Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

Come gather round, friends, and I tell you a tale.

When the red iron appeared on a Frida.

Prior to the 1870s, all the iron that America used was found in the vicinity of the iron works that used it.

Lake Champlain had enough deposits to supply new England, while new Jersey and Pennsylvania had enough to supply the Mid-Atlantic.

But in the 1870s and the 1880s, as the Bessemer process made steelmaking easier than ever before, the demand for iron spiked and it became clear that the current iron deposits wouldn't cut it anymore.

Consider that in 1854, the pig iron production in the United States was 3000 tons annually.

But by 1891 it was 9 million tons.

And as it happened, more iron ranges were being found in the Old Northwest as those woods were being cleared for timber.

Michigan's Marquette Range was opened in 1852.

Its Menominee Range in 1877.

Minnesota's Vermillion Range in 1884, and Minnesota's Mesabi Range in 1891.

But the Ranges, which had hard iron ore, the Marquette, the Menominee, the Gogebic, and the Vermillion were also not enough to supply the ever expanding hunger for iron.

Iron on its own, or as an ingredient for steel, could be used for rails, bridges, barbed wire, skyscrapers, shipbuilding, rail cars, early automobiles, and so much more.

But the times they were a changing, and the Mesabi range was the answer.

Never before had such a rich bit of minerals been discovered anywhere on planet earth.

In previous ranges, the iron had been hard and required serious effort to mine.

But here the ore just lay lady laid right on the surface like grains of sand.

And the steam shovel, which had just been invented, made possible the removal of gargantuan quantities of iron ore.

There was so much ore here, in fact, that it actually frightened investors who feared that it would swamp the market and make what they already had completely worthless.

Enter Frank Hibbing.

He was a timber cruiser who helped found this town in about the dead center of the range in 1893.

And Frank Hibbing knew there was irony here.

He's quoted as saying, I know there is iron here.

I believe there is iron beneath my feet.

My bones.

They feel rusty and chilly.

That line goes about as hard as the iron in the Marquette range.

Am I right?

So anyway, Frank tried to tell the other guys who were founding the town with him.

Hey, let's not found the town here.

There's way too much valuable iron here.

Let's found it two miles to the south.

They didn't listen to him even when they were digging the new well to supply the town with water, and they struck iron ore.

Nobody gave it a second thought.

Frank Hibbing died in 1897, probably wondering about the future of the town that bore his name.

And by that time it was growing rapidly.

Every week, 100 new people were coming in and three new structures were being built.

It had a railroad, five saloons, five hotels, three grocery stores, a dry goods store, two butchers, a bank and a jeweler.

More than 100 test pits had been dug in the vicinity of town, and they all confirmed the same thing that Hibbing was in fact sitting atop heaps of iron ore.

In just a few years, it would be called the richest village on Earth because, in a simple twist of fate, Hibbing wasn't just founded on any iron ore.

It was founded on the most valuable deposit of iron ore found in the midst of the most valuable range of iron ever discovered on planet Earth.

The official number is that over the past 130 years, more than 3.8 billion tons of iron ore have been removed from the Mesabi range.

That's almost impossible to fathom how much iron that is, but it's not hard to see where it came from, Because the iron ore was soft and close to the surface, it basically required the use of the open pit mining method.

And behind me is the pit of all pits, one pit to rule them all, the Grand Canyon of the North.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's the Hull-Rust- Mahoning open pit mine.

This is still after 125 years of use, the world's largest open pit iron ore mine.

It's enough to give you Subterranean Homesick Blues.

Consider that an eight man crew and one steam shovel could dig up in an hour, what 100 underground miners could dig up in a day.

In 1900, one railroad car was being filled every 2.5 minutes with the red dust.

And the mine still grows.

As one article put it.

The pit has produced over one eighth of all the iron ever used in American steelmaking since 1890.

The battleships of two world wars, the bridges of 100 rivers, the cars of a thousand towns, and the nails of a million houses.

And still the pit grows raw and dirty, one foot of earth at a time, toy-like machinery crawling over the bottom.

This mine viewing area actually just reopened about 12 weeks ago because the previous one is nonexistent.

It was mined away.

This pit is about eight miles long, three and a half miles wide and over 500ft deep.

When I first started this channel, I thought about calling it the Pittsburgh Connection because I'm from Pittsburgh and pretty much everything seems to have a connection to Pittsburgh and Hibbing and the Mesabi Iron Range are no different.

Most of the mines here were owned by none other than Pittsburghs Iron King, Henry W Oliver.

If you're from Pittsburgh, think about Oliver Street in downtown.

That's the same guy.

Over the course of the 1890s, he consolidated most of the mines in this area, and in 1901, his company became a subsidiary of the United States Steel, which meant that Henry Oliver and by extension, Andrew Carnegie, owned basically the entire iron supply of the United States.

Most of the ore that was mined from here went out on railroad to Duluth, where it was then loaded onto giant ships like the Edmund Fitzgerald, right?

Great lakes freighters taken across the Great Lakes and in most cases, put back on rail at Conneaut, Ohio, where it was taken down to the Pittsburgh Steel Mills.

Of course, they also made steel in places like Youngstown, Gary, Chicago.

Now, if you're a giant corporation like the Oliver, whose sole mission is digging as much iron ore as you possibly can, it's a little inconvenient when there are tens of thousands of people in your way.

In most cases, that wasn't really an issue.

Mining companies were just leasing the land from the state, so all the miners built their own housing nearby.

They were squatters, basically.

They'd form their own little towns called locations.

And when mines expanded, they'd move their houses to other locations or just build new ones.

The mines always expanded, and so nothing was permanent.

Nearby Eveleth was moved a quarter mile down the road in 1900.

But Hibbing was an actual town with private land holdings and its own government.

And so for a while, Hibbing had some shelter from the storm.

There was a general belief among the townsfolk that they had come here chiefly to mine iron, and so whatever the mining company wanted to do was okay, because it was providing them with jobs.

But by the time the 1910s rolled around, the townsfolk began to realize that they had basically no public amenities whatsoever.

So their new mayor, Victor Power, began levying a higher tax on the mining companies and funding a public building campaign to make Hibbing the most beautiful city on the range.

We're talking a new fire station, fire trucks, new schools, playgrounds, planting trees, building paved alleyways for trash collection, sewer and water lines, electric lines, and paving streets and sidewalks.

Hibbing even went electric, putting up so many new streetlights that they had more light bulbs than Cincinnati.

They built a new city hall, a library, a small zoo, a power plant, and public restrooms.

All these improvements came out to $133 being spent per capita.

Nearby Virginia and Chisholm, were spending $36 and $11 per capita, respectively.

The city of Hibbing was spending about $2 million a year, or 50 to 60 million, in 2025.

And at the same time, all of this was going on, the mine just kept getting bigger.

The mining left the surrounding area a desolation row of huge gaping pits with occasional lakes at the bottom, piles of red mud, tree stumps, abandoned railroad tracks and old roads going in every which direction.

Now it's impossible to truly know what someone is thinking, especially over 100 years ago.

But it is a fact that right after Hibbing started levying this new tax and spending the money in ways that many people at the time saw as frivolous, the mining company suddenly remembered that there was ore under Hibbing You see, miners owned their own homes and their own land, but they didn't own what was underneath that.

The mining company did, and they had the right to exercise it.

So the company lobbied to move everyone and everything out of Hibbing.

But of course, the people protested.

They didn't want to leave.

So the company began a public harassment campaign.

They began to dig up city streets and wreck sewer lines.

They cut off power to different sections of town.

Blasting began to occur more frequently near your schools, and boarding houses, sending rolling stones through windows and into yards.

One of the bridges that provided access to one of the local mines was destroyed.

Hibbing became a peninsula sticking out into the open pit and to further dig in the knife, the company closed two mines, forcing hundreds of men out of work.

No problem for Mayor Power.

He just hired the men to improve the town and pay them the same wages that the company would have.

So the company stopped paying taxes.

They lobbied the state government to limit per capita spending that cities could do.

And it actually worked.

See, the state was making so much money in taxes from the mining companies that they were all too happy to let them do whatever they wanted.

I'm oversimplifying this, of course, but if reading about corporate tax policy in 20th century Minnesota is your thing, then I've linked all my sources in the description down below.

So finally, in 1918, the company and the city government decided to just move the whole thing two miles to the south.

A start date of July 26th, 1919 was set and move in was set for August 1st, 1921.

In the north end of town, my own children have grown.

Well, I was raised on the other.

Despite all of their earlier disagreements, the city and the mining company knew it would be best to work together.

The mining company bought up 80 acres in a location called Alice and began laying out streets.

There were houses and some other buildings already here, but the area was soon taken over by all the newcomers.

The last vestige of Old Alice was the public school, which was torn down in 1979.

Alice quickly became South Hibbing or New Hibbing, and nowadays, of course, its just called Hibbing.

What had been Hibbing became Old Hibbing and is now North Hibbing.

Got it?

In the summer of 1919, Hibbing had over 15,000 people.

And bit by bit, the mining company bought up their properties and began to move them.

Any wood frame building was eligible to be moved.

Brick and stone buildings were too heavy and therefore too dangerous.

So the new city hall and the new power plant and all the new utilities became obsolete just a few years after they went in.

First men would come out and dig a trench around your foundation, so exact measurements could be taken and a replica could be built at your chosen lot in the new town site.

Then metal cribbing was placed in the basement windows in the entire house or store or hotel or church was hoisted up and placed on large metal wheels which were then attached with chains or ropes to a steam tractor.

The tractor would pull the buildings two miles down this road to its new location, as men walked out in front and placed wooden planks in front of the wheels.

If the building was too big to be pulled in one go, it would be chopped up into pieces.

It would take a day or two to bring it all back home.

The success rate was almost perfect, but one out of the over 200 buildings did collapse.

On January 4th, 1921, the three story Sellers Hotel slid off its skids and crashed into a ditch on the side of this road.

It was a $19,000 loss, but miraculously, nobody was seriously injured.

It was a man's job, of course, to move all the buildings, no matter the weather.

This is Minnesota, after all.

So if they didn't work while there was snow on the ground, it probably would still be going on today.

Women either walked or drove the two miles, and boys and girls from the North Country came along in tow.

There are reports of some women and children staying inside the homes while they were moved.

All the furniture stayed put.

Men would stand on the roof with large sticks and move power lines out of the way of chimneys and gables.

By September of 1919, a new YMCA had opened, and Cleveland Cliffs was in the process of building a new office building.

By the end of 1919, a new power plant was complete and a new hospital and telephone exchange were under construction.

The first man to be resettled in New Hibbing is actually still here to this day.

In November 1919, Frank Diorio, a 32 year old Italian immigrant, died tragically in a mining accident and became the first new burial in the new Hibbing Cemetery.

And they don't even make sure his grave is kept clean.

In August of 1920, the church of the Immaculate Conception was moved here to New Hibbing.

A few years after that, a large brick structure, the one you see behind me, was built to replace it.

In fact, so many buildings in the new town were being built out of brick that insurance rates for the whole town dropped.

Just a month after that, they counted 835 water taps in the new town, estimating there were a thousand new houses and stores.

Of course, not everybody moved their house.

Plenty of people were happy to just build a new one.

In July 1921, just before the new town was set to open, all the merchants of old Hibbing held a bargain sale.

They sold everything except postcards of the hanging.

Everything had to go.

Special policemen were sworn in to protect certain stores.

People traveled in from as far as Duluth and maybe even further.

The total value of all articles for sale was conservatively estimated at $1 million, and the beautification campaign didn't just end because the town moved.

Hibbing had high standards for itself.

The new proposed railroad station wasn't up to snuff of the business class, and they made sure to let the railroad men know it.

Now, I don't know for sure if it is, but if this is the railroad station they were fighting for.

They could have fought a little bit harder.

I realize this script is pretty biased against the company and towards the people of Hibbing, right?

It's because most of the sources that I've read put it that way, right?

They wrote that the move was kind of placed on the people of Hibbing as a punishment of sorts for the financial misdeeds of Mayor Power.

And it's also probably because I'm from Pittsburgh, and so I'm kind of inclined to be against industrial tyranny.

But there is substantial evidence to support the carrot over the stick theory, right, that the company wanted to make the move as painless as possible for the people.

And there are two substantial pieces of evidence built of red brick in downtown Hibbing, that you absolutely need to see.

So there were two large construction projects financed by the company that helped cement New Hibbing as the most beautiful city on the range.

The first was the Android Hotel, opened in 1921, and the second was Hibbing High School, which opened in 1924, and I'm sitting on the steps.

This place oozes grandeur.

It costs $3.9 million to build, which was an unheard of sum especially for a school at that time.

It contained a botanical garden, two gymnasiums, a nurse, dentist and doctor on staff.

The first indoor swimming pool in a high school.

An 1800 Seat theater with chandeliers and plush seating.

The library features a 60ft long mural depicting the history of the Iron Range.

The cafeteria used to use bone China to serve lunches.

That's not to mention the brass lighting fixtures and door knobs, the tile flooring, the terracotta statues.

I mean, this place is incredible.

And in fact, its opulence ended up being one of the reasons that the per capita spending cap was instituted by the state in 1925.

So the public building campaign in Hibbing, old and new, came to an end in the midst of the Roaring 20s.

Now, if you want to see a tour that I took of the inside of this high school, make sure to subscribe to my Patreon, where I'm beginning to upload things like that that don't quite make it into these videos.

In December 1921, just in time for Christmas, the new business section of town was open, and a week after that, a local theater was playing a moving picture, no pun intended, of the entire affair.

If anybody can get their hands on that film, I would love to see it.

All in all, the company probably paid about $16 million to move the entire town, though some sources seem to think it was twice that.

To help recoup some of the costs, the company built three large business blocks downtown and sold them off to local merchants.

Now, the town wasn't arranged the same way it had been before.

For instance, there is positively no fourth Street.

There are reports of some people coming back after years away to visit friends or family and getting lost, despite there being familiar landmarks.

Talk about No Direction Home.

And though everyone was excited about the new town, it was a restless farewell.

In 1921, there were still about 8000 people in North Hibbing.

Oliver Iron, only needed about a third of the area.

But because Old Hibbing was now on the other side of the tracks and out of the way, it became the poorer section of town.

Over the decades that followed, the population slowly moved to New Hibbing, or maybe to other places on the range or beyond.

And by 1958, there were only two residents left.

The iron ore poured as the years passed the door.

The drag lines and shovels was humming.

And it's not all over now, baby blue.

The range is still moving.

In 2015, U.S.

highway 53 near Virginia had to be relocated to allow for a mine expansion.

The bridge that now takes it over the Rushlow pit is one of the tallest in the entire state.

There is still so much iron ore there that it was cheaper for the state to build a new highway than to just buy the mineral rights.

Just last year, U.S.

steel bought out about half the town of Kinney.

County Highway Five has been relocated and about half the places shown on this 1951 USGS map just don't exist anymore.

The mine must always expand.

After the end of World War two, it wasn't clear for how much longer the mining could actually continue.

All the iron had been got at least the best of it.

But there is another rock here that contains iron within it.

It's called taconite.

And it wasn't until the late 1950s that it became economically feasible to separate the iron from the taconite.

That process takes place at giant mills that actually sit at the bottom of the pit.

But as the years go on, greater mechanization means that fewer workers are needed.

Things have changed.

Hibbing has that Rust Belt feel familiar to many Americans.

And I'm from Pittsburgh.

I should know.

Before we wrap this thing up, I want to give a huge shout out to the Hibbing Historical Society because they provided me with a lot of photos and a lot of information about this topic.

They've also got a great museum that if you're in Hibbing, you should most certainly check out.

As I've said before in this channel, it's very important to support your local historical societies because without them, a lot of what we know about our local heritage would be lost.

Frank Hibbing always felt like his town was supposed to be born somewhere else, and after about 20 years, it picked up and moved to where it was always supposed to be.

It totally reinvented itself.

After the good Iron ran out, it had a come back with taconite, and that served it pretty well ever since.

It's been recognized for its place in American history, and though it's still active, I think a lot of people would agree that Hibbing is past its prime.

Just like any industrial town in America.

The 1980s was rough.

The steel industry atrophied, and thus the need for taconite fell dramatically.

The population peaked in 1980 at 21,193.

As of the 2020 census, there are 16,214 people here, and it's still the largest town on the range.

The high school was built for 1500 students, but now only serves about 500.

The Android Hotel closed in 1977 and sat abandoned for almost 20 years before being rehabbed into a senior living community, which now is home to about 20% of Hibbing senior population.

Earlier in 2025, the taconite plant was idled and over 600 workers were laid off.

This isn't all that unusual, as there are sometimes closures that last a few weeks or maybe even a few months.

It all depends on the market as a whole, it's a very cyclical industry.

But I've talked to some people in town who feel like this time it will be worse than the others.

I mean, mathematically, there has to come a day when the mining companies have taken from the ground everything they could steel.

And in a town built on iron mining, what happens then?

But I don't want you to leave here thinking it's all North country blues.

So I'll leave you with a fun fact.

Hibbing is also home to the Greyhound Bus Museum, because that company started here in 1914, transporting minors between Old Hibbing and Alice.

I guess Hibbing and its people have always been a town on the move.

And now it's time for me to leave Hibbing, too.

I'm heading out on highway 61.

Thanks for watching.

I'll see you next time.

Hey, summer is gone.

The ground's turning cold.

These stars, one by one, they're folding.

My children will go as soon as they grow.

Father ain't nothing here now to hold them.