The Trout Lake Concentrator - Coleraine, MN

"The mill building is commodious and the machinery 
is conveniently arranged." 

The Trout Lake Concentrator circa 1920

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.

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