TOWER-The building might still be a work in progress, and it certainly does need a heating system, but St. Mary’s Hall at the Lake Vermilion Cultural Center hosted its third and final event of the season on Tuesday evening. The so-called “Triple-Header Event” featured a history talk by Iron Range historian Pam Brunfelt, a buffet-style dinner featuring locally grown and locally-harvested foods, and an encore concert from The Sectionals, who had performed at the center in August.
Brunfelt started out her informal lecture by speaking about the building itself.
“It’s a beautiful building,” she said, “and there is a reason it is so small.”
There weren’t many Episcopalians that settled on the Iron Range, she said.
“There are Episcopalian churches all around the Iron Range,” she said, “but why? They were the bosses, and they built these gorgeous buildings.”
Brunfelt said the immigrant laborers who came to work in the mines most likely never entered these churches.
“There were 43 different ethnic groups that settled here,” she said. “But the Yankees didn’t consider themselves an ethnic group.”
Brunfelt is an Iron Ranger, and her studies of the area’s history have brought her a deeper understanding of both the history and the culture of this unique area.
After graduating from high school in Virginia and college at Mankato State, she ended up working outside the Range, in both Otter Tail and Crow Wing counties.
Living away helped her better understand the culture of the community she grew up in, “in ways I didn’t when I was here.”
Along the way she earned her master’s degree, then began a long teaching career at Mesabi and then Vermilion Community College. After retiring, she has focused her research on the importance of the Iron Range’s iron ore to the nation, including its importance during World War II.
Brunfelt, who has been recovering from a stroke, sometimes struggled a bit with her train of thought and word-finding, but the amount of knowledge knocking around in her brain was apparent to everyone in the room, and she always got back on track with a smile on her face. This is the first time she has spoken in public in almost two years, and if this audience’s response to her talk was any indication, she will continue to be in demand as a speaker.
“I became convinced the history of the Iron Range was important to the whole state,” she said. And her later research showed her how the Iron Range was important to the entire nation.
The Iron Range was a special kind of melting pot, a pot forged in iron. The three iron ranges, Vermilion, Mesabi, and Cuyuna were home to some of the richest iron ores ever found. And as those ore bodies were developed, something else happened.
With the mixing of so many different cultures, everyone adopted aspects gleaned from others. Saunas became important not just for the Finns, and the Italian specialty of rigatoni became the household dish for everyone.
“We learned to identify with each other,” she said. “When a new kid came to school, we wanted to know their culture, not where they had moved here from. We knew our friends by their ethnicities and were proud of it. We valued each other’s specialties.”
The history of Iron Range mining isn’t being taught as it should be, Brunfelt said, and isn’t represented in the pages of history books.
“Andrew Carnegie said it [iron ore] was more precious than gold,” she said, “because it built America, not gold, silver, or copper. Don’t ever forget that.”
Brunfelt did admit she didn’t have a primary source for that quote, but said it rang true.
“We wouldn’t have the Brooklyn Bridge or the Golden Gate Bridge or all our skyscrapers without our iron ore,” she said. “Why aren’t our children taught about the half a billion tons of iron ore that was mined here during World War II? Would we have won World War II without that? No.”
The ore mined from the Iron Range built more ships than any other nation produced during World War II, and many were built in Duluth and Superior, she said.
“We were the center of the universe in World War II,” she said.
The U.S. Air Force patrolled the skies over the Range mines to protect them from enemy attacks. And some in the audience could remember the sight of those planes in the sky.
History has a way of repeating itself. Brunfelt’s senior thesis in college was about a proposal by an international mining company for a copper mine near the Boundary Waters.
“Now it’s staring us in the face again, but this time with another company,” she said.
Brunfelt talked about how iron mining was not as dangerous to the environment.
“It is not comparable to copper-nickel mining,” she said.
“My college research showed me how dangerous copper mining is to our water.”
Brunfelt said the Iron Range mining companies have never explained to their miners how iron mining is different.
And if it’s up to Brunfelt, a lot more people are going to learn the history of the Iron Range, its miners, and the importance of the ore mined here to the country and the world.