Text and Photos by Henrylito D. Tacio
“How many roads must a man walk down before you call him a man? How many seas must a white dove sail before she sleeps in the sand? How many times must the cannon balls fly before they’re forever banned?”
Are those lines familiar to you? If you say they’re quoted from the song Blowin’ in the Wind,” you are right. But do you know where Bob Dylan, the Nobel prize singer who wrote the lyrics himself, grew up?
Well, the answer, my friend, is Hibbing, Minnesota. Although Robert Zimmerman (that is his original name before he changed it to Bob Dylan after poet Dylan Thomas) was born in Duluth (the third largest city in Minnesota, after Minneapolis and Saint Paul), he spent his formative years of his childhood in Hibbing.
In fact, if you have the opportunity to visit the city, you still get to see the place the singer grew up in. It is located at 2425 7th Avenue. The house, where he lived in from 1948 until 1959, is well-preserved, soaked in a 50s vibe with a lot of the original vintage décor.
Many people come to the city just to see the house. In May 1991, the city’s library started the Bob Dylan Collection. “No one finds themselves in Hibbing by accident,” says one visitor. “You have to aim for the town where Bob Dylan grew up, to end up here.”
Bob Dylan is just one of the city’s claims to fame. Other well-known personalities from Hibbing include Bruce Carlson, US Air Force Commander; Dick Garmaker and Kevin McHale, both professional basketball players; Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a novelist and essayist; Bethany McLean, the co-author of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room; and Rudy Perpich, who became governor of Minnesota.
Mining town
Ask anyone in Hibbing and they’ll tell you that the city has plenty of history. Incorporated in 1893, it became the largest of the many mining towns on the iron-ore-rich Mesabi Range – the “richest village in the world,” as it was then called. Actually, the city was named in honor of Frank Hibbing, its founder. Born in Germany in 1857, he migrated to the United States with his parents when he was still a little boy.
My sister came to the United States in 1998 and lived in Hibbing, where her husband, Engr. Daniel Chase, worked in a mining company. When she visited us in 1999, she brought some T-shirts with the words, “Hibbing, the world’s largest open pit mine.” What does this mean, I then wondered.
Well, I found the answer to my question when I visited her. I found out that Hibbing has the world’s largest opencast iron-ore workings, which is open to the public. The Hull-Rust-Mahoning Mine witnessed the development of strip mining technology. In its peak production years during World Wars I and II, the mine supplied as much as one-fourth of all the iron ore mined in the United States.
History records stated that the area of the Mesabi Iron Range was explored in 1893-94, shortly after the first Mesabi ore was shipped from the nearby Mountain Iron Mine in 1892. Early underground mining at Hull-Rust-Mahoning soon gave way to strip mining, a process better suited to the soft, shallow ore deposits of the Mesabi.
The village of Hibbing grew near the mine pit. In fact, it was too near that in 1918, all buildings in the northern section of town were mounted on steel wheels and moved two miles to the south to make room for the mine’s expansion. The move took two years and cost $16 million to complete.
Today, after more than 120 years, the landscape of the mine has inspired folks to coin the phrase, “Grand Canyon of the North” to describe the sight. The open pit covers more than two thousand hectares; the maximum length is more than 12 kilometers while the maximum width is almost 7 kilometers.
Bus town too
Hibbing is also recognized as the birthplace of the bus industry in the United States. It sprang from the business acumen of Carl Wickman and Andrew Anderson – who opened the first bus line (with one bus) between the towns of Hibbing and Alice in 1914. They figured the region’s iron miners would make good mass transit customers. They did, and the bus line grew to become what we now know as the Greyhound bus lines (the fastest breed of dog used in dog racing).
Although Greyhound Bus is now headquartered in Dallas, Texas, the Greyhound Bus Museum is located in Hibbing. It houses seventeen historical buses, which are part of an informative museum tour. To start the tour, you pass through a tunnel that comes alive with auto sounds of 1914.
Inside the museum, you get to know the history of the bus industry, from its humble beginnings using pictorial displays, and hundreds of artifacts and memorabilia. There’s also a diorama of World War II which illustrates how Greyhound contributed to the war effort.
The museum is the brainchild of Gene Nicolelli, who has never been a Greyhound employee and who frankly admitted, “I have no interest in buses at all.” But he was intrigued by the “fortitude, foresight, and guts” of Wickman and Anderson. “It just fascinated the living daylights out of me,” he said.
If you want to know more about Hibbing and its history, don’t miss to visit the Hibbing Historical Museum. You will get a glimpse of more logging and mining tools, accompanied by pictorial displays..
Hibbing high school
My sister and her family used to live near Hibbing High School, another must-see. Construction of this historic school was started in 1920. The building is made up of red brick trimmed with Bedford stone and is arranged in the shape of the letter E. It was built to replace the old high school, which had to be torn down because of the encroaching mining operations.
Since the mining companies were responsible for the move, they provided for about 95% of the cost. The lavish Tudor Revival building has become known as the “castle in the woods” and – thanks to its polished brass fixtures – the “school with the golden door knobs.”
The school has an impressive auditorium that was designed after the old Capitol Theater, which was located in New York City. It seats 1800, has a full Broadway stage, as well as chandeliers of cut glass imported from the former Czechoslovakia. The elaborate pipe organ, an old Barton vaudeville organ, is one of two left in the country and was purchased and installed in 1923.
Hibbing High School is listed on the US National Register of Historic Places “for its state-level significance in the themes of architecture, education, industry, and politics/government.” Visitors may tour the building on their own during the school year or on guided tours during the summer.
The main routes in Hibbing are US Highway 169, State Highway 38, State Highway 73, Howard Street, and First Avenue. It is about 95 kilometers northwest of Duluth, Minnesota.
Recently, I visited the city again. As I left the place, it seemed I could hear Bob Dylan singing: “I could stay with you forever and never realize the time.” — ###
