The Town That Was Moved Two Miles to Dig Up What Was Under It: Hibbing, Minnesota

In 1919, in a village on the Mesabi Range in northern Minnesota, men began putting logs under people's houses. Over the next two years, roughly 185 homes and 20 businesses were jacked up, rolled onto wooden rails, and hauled two miles south by horses, farm tractors and a steam crawler. Buildings too large to move whole were sawn into three pieces. A man rode on the roofs with a long wooden stick to lift the electric lines over as each house passed underneath. They did it because the iron ore beneath the town was valued at $85 million, and the Oliver Iron Mining Company - a subsidiary of US Steel - had decided it wanted the ground the town was standing on. To get the town to agree, the company built it a high school. It cost $3.9 million in 1920, around $62 million today. The auditorium seats 1,800 and was patterned after the Capitol Theatre in New York. The Belgian cut-glass chandeliers cost $15,000 each and are insured today for $250,000 apiece. It is still a working public high school. But not every building made the trip. By 1935 the company had stopped moving houses - it tore the rest down and paid the owners a fraction of their value. In August 1941 the photographer John Vachon shot both halves of the story on the same assignment: a bright new town with a palace of a school in it, and the slow demolition of the place it used to be. This is the story of Hibbing, Minnesota - and of what a company decided a town was worth. 📍 If you grew up in Hibbing or on the Range - and especially if your family's house was one of the ones that made the trip — tell me in the comments. I read every one. Subscribe to The Company Town - a new documentary every week. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ CHAPTERS 0:00 They Moved the Whole Town 1:43 1 — Franz Dietrich von Ahlen 4:12 2 — The Richest Village in the World 7:12 3 — Fifteen Years 9:40 4 — On Logs 12:45 5 — The Palace 16:24 6 — What Came Out of It 19:15 7 — The Ones They Didn't Move 22:17 8 — A Quarter of All the Iron 25:58 9 — August 1982 29:29 10 — Still Here 32:25 Close ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ SOURCES Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Collection - photographs of Hibbing by John Vachon, August 1941 Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs - Mesabi Range mining, 1906 and 1928 MNopedia / Minnesota Historical Society — Relocation of Hibbing, 1919–1921 U.S. Census, 1900–2020 All photographs used are public domain. Connective and atmospheric imagery is illustrated and labelled as such on screen. #Hibbing #Minnesota #IronRange #AmericanHistory #MiningHistory #Documentary