This week's post revisits the town of Coleraine, MN - home of the first beneficiation plant in the western Mesabi, the Trout Lake Concentrator.  Coleraine is also home to the Canisteo Pit, a long and narrow open pit mine that borders the north end of the town.   Like many of the abandoned open pit mines in the western Mesabi, the historical mines that created the Canisteo Pit turned off their dewatering pumps as their ore bodies became exhausted, allowing for the Pit to transition into a lake.  The Mesabi Range continues to transition, moving from an agricultural landscape into an industrial one, and now from an industrial landscape into a landscape dominated by leisure and recreation.  In addition to the abundance of pan-fish, trout and bass that now call the Canisteo Pit home, the Pit contains the historic workings of roughly 20 open pit mines that ceased shipping low-grade ores in the mid-1980s.  

Nashwauk, MN is located in Itasca Co, within the western branch of the Mesabi Range, a geologic region known historically for its abundance of low-grade, siliceous iron ores.  These ores, unlike the direct shipping ores that brought fame and fortune to the Vermillion Range, were encased in the earth like baklava, with thin layers of silica gangue mixed with thin layers of iron ore.  Mining engineers and furnace operators found this ore to be irritable, and when fed directly to the blast furnaces it caused a sort of industrial indigestion as the high-silica content in the ore had a tendency to clog-up the furnace's innards.

Although the Trout Lake Concentrator was the first full scale, low-grade iron ore concentrator on the Mesabi Range, a handful of experimental (or pilot) plants proceeded it.  Mining Companies were well aware of the potentially profitable low-grade iron ore deposits in the western Mesabi starting in the late 1890s, and by the turn of the twentieth century, The Oliver Iron Mining Co. (OIMC) took the first step in making this geologic probability an envirotechnical reality.  The Acturus Mine, located roughly a mile northwest of Marble, MN, is where the story of Lake Superior iron ore concentration begins.

The Trout Lake Concentrator is the first in the series of ghost plants that this blog will cover.  Ghost plants are are those industrial complexes that are visibly absent from the landscape, but whose environmental legacies persist - sometimes in ground water, other times in soils - but remain frequently absent from the contemporary heritage discourse.   A goal of my research is to think about how we, as heritage professionals, can act as necromancers and bring  these Ghost plants, and their environmental legacies, back to life within the contemporary heritage discourse.

The first post in the beneficiation plant series features the Oliver Iron Mining Company's (OIMC) flagship plant, The Trout Lake Concentrator.  Completed in 1909 (construction started in 1907) on the eastern shore of Trout Lake, just south of Coleraine, MN, the Trout Lake Concentrator served as a custom beneficiation plant for the OIMC's low-grade iron ore mines of the Western Mesabi.  These mines were mainly open-pit undertakings, rather than the underground mines that produced much of the high-grade, direct shipping ore of the region.