This past weekend was filled with stories of dreams.  Many people talked of dreams and idealized what the dream once fulfilled would be; but those same people never walk the path to make the dreams come true.  They are never willing to sacrifice their generation to create a better future for the next.

This story is real, not a dream.  It took one generation to build the foundation of the dream, a second generation to suffer through a tough life to sustain the dream so that the third generation could fulfill the dream.  And when the dream was reachable, the second generation urged their children to reach out for the dream and leave the town.  They knew, like the “Giving Tree”, the dream could not be fulfilled in their town and like the “Giving Tree” their town could only eventually become a stump for the little boy, now an old man, to sit on.

This story is not a history of the very east end of the Iron Range where a very strong and independent people settled in the country and it is not another story about their second generation became part of what some have called the greatest generation.  This story is about how a “Giving Town” was created in the Aurora/Hoyt Lakes area. The same story can be told about Eveleth or Gilbert or Biwabik.

It is a story about how today the town hangs on to their dreams and how they have made a home for a junior hockey team so that fifth and sixth generations can fulfill their dreams and move on.

Immigrants settled the center of the Minnesota Arrowhead first.  It was simple economics.  It was cheaper for businesses that planned to mine the newly found iron ore in Tower to build a railroad in a straight line to Lake Superior and a harbor to load the ships to carry the ore to the many smelters in the East and Midwest.

They created Two Harbors for the ships and laid track to Tower.  Every 5-10 miles, they had to create watering stations for the steam engines.  That opened up the Arrowhead Country for lumbering.  A few of the watering stations added a sawmill to cut the lumber.  Towns like Wales, Brimson, Breda, Fairbanks, Reno, and Skibo were built by the watering places and settled by the first generation.  Breda grew to be a town of 1500 people in the late 1880’s.

That first generation was rowdier then the Wild West.  Immigrants from areas of strife in Europe settled in those towns and homesteaded along the tracks.  They worked in the towns, lumber mills, lumber camps, and tried to farm the land that was difficult to farm.  They weren’t miners.  The mining was done in Tower.  The land nearby the tracks that they homesteaded grew boulders from old glaciers every spring.  By 1900, most of the lumbering was moved west when the railroad built westward following new iron ore mines.  The railroad created the towns of Aurora, Biwabik, Gilbert, Eveleth, and Virginia-a town every 5-10 miles to water the engines.

The first generation moved with the rails.  In 1900, the town of Aurora was created and the town of Breda was dying.  Today, the only remnant of Breda is a rusty small black and white sign on the west side of the County Road 44 north of Brimson.  Most would think it points to Breda Lake; but the road was the original road to the town of Breda.  The town site is totally gone.  Mother Nature has claimed everything, even the graveyard.

The first generation had problems some would consider modern.  Some of the immigrants were Sami from Finland and in some countries today the Sami are still considered not “white” and of “low intelligence” or more simply “reindeer herders”.  Mixed with immigrants from Norway, Sweden, Italy, and the Balkens, the first generation was dispirited and wary of each other.  To the rest of the more settle parts of Minnesota and the USA, all of these nationalities were considered “not white enough” or “low intelligence”.

Perhaps that is what made them Iron Rangers.  By the second generation, nationalities were mostly lost.  Most made fun of these differences and often greeted each other with what today people would call a derogatory term.  That “homogenization” may have been the result of surviving the Great Depression.

The second generation lives started slow.  Once the USA entered World War I, good times started to roll and the economy boomed.  Automobiles and army equipment needed steel.  Most of the lumbering was gone, having moved westward again, but by then the town’s roots were set.

The first generation consisted of hard workers and almost all were great drinkers.  Most men remained married (some marriages had very vague licenses), but left the child rearing to the wives.  They all strove to own their house.  By the time the second generation hit puberty, the depression hit.

An Aurora second “generationer” was asked once, what was it like in Aurora during the depression.  His answer was the town had no money.  What he meant is that there was little money circulating in the town; people hoarded the money and didn’t trust the banks to not fail.  They spent as little as possible and deflated the economy worst.  The second generation felt fear of losing what they had and was driven to hang on till the economy changed.  They had already invested their lives in the idea of a better tomorrow for their children in the town of Aurora.

The old timer went on to say, the government (meaning state and federal) would provide some money to the city, township and county governments.  They would create some jobs that he called “widow work”.  During the depression, even the widows were on a list to be called to work the heaviest construction jobs.  A man would work for her and split the $1 dollar a day pay.  Each usually got 50 cents.  That was the old timer’s only work for most of the 1930′s.

With time on their hands, the young second generation men would play hockey in the winter.  There was little outdoor lighting at the time, but plenty of young men during the day.  The old timer played goalie and used old Sears catalogs for pads.  He was the best skater; with no goalie skates to play in, that made sense.  They played town hockey (sort of like the hockey in the movie “Mystery Alaska”).

The economy sputtered along until World War II started.  The number of mines open in the shipping season increased.  The old timer worked seasonal every year in the 1940′s for the railroads at the time, getting laid off during the winter.  The mines could not ship ore in the winter cold.  He said he was 37 when he could finally work full time year round.  That was 1948.

In the early forties, fifty years after first settling in the Arrowhead, the town of Aurora finally found prosperity.  They took that prosperity and invested heavily in infrastructure for their kids.  The schools were top rated offering choices the allowed the kids to direct their careers, everything from the arts and sciences, to secretarial, to woodworking, and to metal working.  The town focused on its school sports.  Games were well attended.  Kids growing up at that time in Aurora were excited about their future.  Their generation could dream for themselves.

The second generation had sacrificed their dreams to hang on.  Now they were giving their children the tools to fulfill their dreams.  They knew that the child would move elsewhere to follow their dream and encouraged them to do so.  Many did.  Like the “Giving Tree”, each child that left Aurora would be one more “branch” gone from the town.

Soon the “Giving Town” would be struggling to survive.

Part II will be posted on Wednesday.