Who Remembers Calumet Location?

There is the familiar saying, "You can't go home again." I have returned to my childhood home many times over the years. Early on it was to visit my parents and relatives. This month a high school friend and I stopped to visit former high school chums at a class reunion. (Bob did the driving, or I would not have gone. It totals to about 16 hours of drive time.)

Each time I have returned to Ely, MN, I stopped to wander around the ideal spot for growing up during the depression. It was called Calumet Location, located a mile from town, in the north woods, next to a large freshwater lake. I wrote about this idyllic spot in my first book, A (not so) Simple Life.

During the iron ore mining boom on the Iron Range of north eastern Minnesota, the Olive Iron Mining Company built small locations of company houses for the miners to live in, close to the mines, with rents modestly priced. After the closing of the mines the houses were sold to the miners occupying the houses and moved away. We had been told that the ground was sinking under the location because the closed mines were filling with water and the land was collapsing into the empty tunnels.

A company mining house in Calumet Location

The first time I visited my old stamping grounds I recognized the sidewalks, the alley and the very spot our house had been. Over the years all of this disappeared, devoured by the forest and several new landowners who had built on the former condemned property. The land beneath the mines had become a crystal lake, filled with fish and a walking path built around it.

Calumet was so very special to all of us who once lived there that I included several chapters about this precious garden of Eden in my book. I did not want it to disappear from maps and memories. At one time I purchased a brick for a downtown street with the names of my parents, including the words, "Calumet Location". As the town would change and former residents would leave with new arrivals taking their turn, I wanted them to see that brick and ask someone, "Where was Calumet Location?"

This last trip to my hometown of Ely, Minnesota was truly "bitter-sweet". There were no family members remaining to tend to my parents grave and I spent some time attempting to renew the names on their headstones. My book about Ely and my present home of Hot Springs, SD, was no longer available at the local bookstore. I asked some locals what they knew about Calumet Location. I received only blank stares. The brick in the downtown area was blurred with age and barely visible.The former library was condemned and barred from curious visitors who wanted to view the beautiful murals on the walls just one more time.

What did I expect? I know change happens. It is part of life. But as I sank into a depression over my struggle to fight the change, a few things happened that renewed hope. I made a trip to the local bookstore and while browsing the shelves came across a publication titled, Where in the World was Calumet.....

It listed all of the former mining locations, all 9 of them. As I leafed through I found our family name on the location of our home in Calumet, and further on a page titled, "The Former Residents Speak...." The author, David Kess, from the Ely-Winton Historical Society quotes from my book "A (Not So) Simple Life." Of course it is about my childhood years in Calumet Location.

Later I visited the Ely-Winton Historical Society and Museum located in the Vermilion Community College. Once again as I walked through years of Ely history from logging, mining and tourism and the Boundary Waters, I viewed familiar places and faces. I found another book by David Kess, More Than Just Ore. The Era That Really Made Ely. As I thumbed through many recognizable faces and places I found a photo of my father in the "cage" (elevator) of the mine entrance that brought the miners to and from the depths of the mine.

All of this was comforting to me, a former resident, who still subscribes to the Ely paper, who lives in a town so very similar to the one I grew up in, and who so deeply desires to have her former childhood location remembered as it once was, filled with laughter of children playing in the woods, swimming and fishing the lake, dreaming dreams of their future in the world "out there", hard working miners who toiled underground to give their children a better life above the ground, mothers and wives who ironed, washed, cooked, canned, pickled, preserved, hung clothes on the line, made pasties for their husbands lunches and poticas for weddings, funerals and other celebrations.

I do not want this place lost in memory when I and the last of my family and friends have left this earth. Now I know that it will live on, not only in my book, but in the books of David Kess and other Ely residents and in that museum in the former Ely Junior College that I once was fortunate to have attended, and that was paid for entirely by the Oliver Iron Mining Company and the sweat of the immigrant miners, who were proud of the schools that would raise their children to a better life out of the damp and dangers of the underground iron mines.

It Feels Like Minnesota

The storm brought us over six inches of snow. We all know that we need the moisture badly and even though the snowfall amounts to about a half an inch of actual water, we, in the Black Hills, are grateful for whatever falls from the clouds.

The sounds of snow shovels and snow blowers, almost forgotten since we left Minnesota, brought familiar memories. I often felt surrounded by snow while growing up in north woods, close to the Canadian border. It usually fell around the end of October and remained on the ground, with gradual additions, until late in April. I remember at least once walking through some left-over snow in the woods in the month of May. Of course, it was under the perpetual shade of some trees, but it was there for me to slop through.

My family lived in the pristine woods, about a mile from the small town of Ely, and the snow remained clean and white throughout the long, long winter. We shoveled it, sledded on it, made lengthy snow tunnels in it, rolled it into snowmen and snow forts which protected us during snow ball fights. We ate it. There was no time to go back into the house for a glass of water. It was unsoiled, after all. After hours in the white stuff, hungry and tired, we stomped into the kitchen, scraped our boots, shook off our soggy mittens and unlayerd our heavy woolen snowsuits. The smell of wet wool filled the kitchen for a time, until the aroma of my mother's fresh bread overpowered all other odors.

Oh, the smell of hot chocolate and fresh, buttered bread, still lingers within me! The warmth of the kitchen and hot food took away the shivers from snow that sneaked in through cracks in our winter armor, or, perhaps soaked through the thick wool after so long in the snow. Back then we stayed out doors for much of the day, not being distracted by television or computers.

The darkness came early, and after dinner and dishes, there were board games, radio shows and books, books and more books. Boredom was an unfamiliar word. Life was full back in those days so long ago, in the remote forests of northern Minnesota.