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[FOLK MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Alfred, Lon, and Cassius Merritt were all expert lumbermen, well acquainted with the woods and swamps of Northeastern Minnesota. Their family, including three other brothers, migrated from Pennsylvania to the area surrounding Lake Superior in the years just before Minnesota became a state, when the timber industry was just taking hold.

In 1887, Cassius was assessing timber not far from where the town of Mountain Iron is today. Walking along with his head tipped back to observe the quality of the mighty pines, he tripped and fell head first onto the ground. Andrus Merritt followed his brother's progress on the range and wrote a book describing their adventure, called The Story of the Mesabi.

SPEAKER 2: Being an observant man, his fall brought to light a piece of iron ore about as big as his two fists. He stored it in his pack and had it assayed when he returned to Duluth. It turned out to be high-grade ore.

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SPEAKER 1: One year later, the brothers began sending out small surveying parties to map out the rough boundaries of the ore that was hiding just beneath the surface of the ground. Again, Andrus Merritt.

SPEAKER 2: The men would go out with 100-pound packs on their backs containing a 30-day supply of food. The rule was to carry them throughout the day and move the camp forward from night to night. This is such exacting labor that only those whose muscles have been inured to toil and spirits strengthened by abundant hardships are able to hold their course.

SPEAKER 1: The surveyors walked slowly through the forest, holding a dip needle that looked like a compass but reacted when the men passed over the magnetic walls surrounding the ore. The Merritts soon realized their find was much bigger than any of them had imagined. They began buying up large sections of land on the range. A crew started testing for the best place to build a mine. In 1890, they found a spot on the side of a hill that was soon called Mountain Iron.

GRANT MERRITT: They started working feverishly to dig the ore out. They decided that they could do it with steam shovels, which had never been done before.

SPEAKER 1: Grant Merritt is Alfred Merritt's grandson and the family historian. He lives in the Twin Cities suburb of New Hope today.

GRANT MERRITT: Marvin Lampa, historian from the Iron Range, said, well the Merritt's weren't going to mine iron ore. They were going to farm it. And that's about what they did. They went into huge strip mining operations.

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SPEAKER 1: Unlike the solid chunks of ore on the Vermilion Range just north of Mesabi, this new form of iron was soft and powdery. It was also cheap to produce. It only cost $0.03 a ton to scrape Mesabi ore from the ground, compared to $1 a ton to mine ore at Vermilion. But even though the iron ore was plentiful and cheap, the Merritts had a hard time convincing potential investors that it was worth something.

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Years later, Lon Merritt described the Mesabi's critics.

SPEAKER 3: All sorts of experts were sent to look it over and report on it. Most of them said it was no good. One geologist with a country-wide reputation visited us, looked over the property, and reported that there was no ore. But if a geologist is a bad man to find a mine, he's a good man to help you sell one. He has a reputation, and people with money rely on him.

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SPEAKER 1: The Merritts had ore, but it was stranded deep in the north woods. They needed to haul it from Mountain Iron to Lake Superior, nearly 70 miles away, where it could be shipped to steel mills in the east. For that, they needed both a railroad and an ore dock where ships could receive the iron.

The Merritts couldn't get any of the existing railroads to build a line from mountain iron to the port at Duluth, so they began building their own track. Grant Merritt.

GRANT MERRITT: In 7 months, they built the railroad from Stony Brook Junction, 26 miles into Duluth, and the ore dock, as well as several hundred ore cars. And they built the ore dock in about five months, which I find rather incredible, because the ore dock was 2,300 long and had 385 pockets for the ore.

And they started the dock in the winter, brought in timbers from Oregon or Washington, 1,000-foot timbers. And they put them down through the ice in order to get it done.

SPEAKER 1: Even 100 years ago, the risk they were taking by pushing their project so quickly was enormous. But the Merritts' drive to develop the Mesabi sparked an iron rush on the range. By 1893, more than 100 entrepreneurs had mines on the Mesabi. But the country soon plunged into the worst economic depression in its history, and investors were scarce.

The Merritts finally approached John D. Rockefeller for help. He agreed to loan the brothers $500,000 and pool some of his mining interests with the Merritts' holdings on the Mesabi.

GRANT MERRITT: Rockefeller believed really not very much in competition. He believed in consolidation, that it was more efficient to have one large company, like Standard Oil. And so he did the same thing here. He forced them into what was called the Lake Superior Consolidated Trust Company, into which the Merritts put all their properties, and Rockefeller put three mines. Then the Merritts took stock in the company and controlled the company, and Rockefeller loaned the company money and took bonds.

SPEAKER 1: With Rockefeller's money, the Merritts quickly finished their railroad. In July of 1893, the first train car of ore shipped entirely over their track arrived at their new ore docks in Duluth. Lon Merritt was still in New York working out the final details of their deal with Rockefeller. His wife Elizabeth wrote him a letter describing the train's arrival.

SPEAKER 4: A way up the hill through the smoke and haze, we could see a black line that looked like a caterpillar creeping slowly along. Soon it came on to the trestle work and then on to the dock, where we all stood waiting for it. It moved out until the ore cars were over the pockets and then stopped to unload. Nobody made a sound, not a hurrah or anything, while they came on the dock. I will send you a little of the ore from the cars that came down today so that you will realize that they really have begun to ship the ore.

SPEAKER 1: Even with Rockefeller's money, the Merritts were still unable to pay their creditors. Railroad debt was piling up at a rate of $10,000 per day. The workers began appearing at the Duluth office, demanding payment with shotguns in hand.

On top of this, the Merritts were still unable to sell the ore because the Eastern blast furnaces that made steel still hadn't been adapted to process this new powdery form of ore. In his memoir, John D. Rockefeller wrote that he was reluctant to provide more cash, but he saw no choice.

SPEAKER 5: Although we were minority holders of stock, it seemed to be up to us to keep the enterprise alive through the harrowing panic days. I had to loan my personal securities to raise money. Finally, we were compelled to supply a great deal of actual cash to get it we were obliged to go into the then greatly upset money market and buy currency at a high premium to ship west by express to pay the laborers on the railroad to keep them alive.

SPEAKER 1: The Merritts were nearly bankrupt. In January 1894, Rockefeller agreed to bail them out, but also to let them regain control of Consolidated Mining at a later date.

Meanwhile, an earlier deal between the Merritts and Rockefeller went sour, and the brothers accused Rockefeller of trying to swindle them out of their share in the company. Andrus Merritt.

SPEAKER 2: In retrospect, it seems clear that almost from the first, Mr. Rockefeller laid his plans to get us because of this vast potential wealth in our hands. He didn't intend to rob us of all our possessions, no, but to use us to further his own plans and place himself in a position of commanding power in the economic world, where his desire to bind men by chains of gold would be satisfied.

SPEAKER 1: In 1895, the Merritts sued Rockefeller for fraud, and the court awarded the family almost $1 million. But that decision was overturned 15 months later on appeal. In the end, Rockefeller agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle the Merritts' debt, but the family lost all of their holdings on the range, including the giant ore dock, the railroad, and three iron ore mines.

When US Steel formed six years later, Rockefeller sold his interests on the Mesabi Range for $80 million. Grant Merritt says the entire state of Minnesota lost out when Rockefeller took hold of his family's Mesabi mines.

GRANT MERRITT: A lot of the money that was sucked out to Pittsburgh and New York would have stayed here in Minnesota. I mean, the Merritts would have had a big piece of it. They wouldn't have had at all. Rockefeller would have had plenty, but a lot of that money would have stayed here and would have benefited Minnesota and Northeastern Minnesota for these ensuing 100 years.

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SPEAKER 1: Alfred Merritt stayed in mining for the rest of his life. He went west to California and later Utah, where he managed lead, silver, and zinc mines. His brother Lon became the commissioner of finance for the City of Duluth. Cassius died in 1893 of a heart attack while the brothers were still deeply in debt. The Merritts believe he died of a broken heart. The family still owns mineral rights on more than 100 acres in Northern Minnesota, and grandson Grant Merritt hopes the family can start drilling soon for new deposits of ore.

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To see pictures of the Merritts and their Mesabi mines, you can visit our website at www.mpr.org. Our story on the Merritts was produced by Annie Feidt with Kate Kuhn and edited by Stephen Smith. We also had help from music librarian Rex Levang and Scott Liebers. Thanks to Stephen Smith, Lynn Warfel Holt, Allen Baker, and Bob Collins for bringing the Merritts and Mr. Rockefeller to life. I'm Lorna Benson.

The Minnesota Century Project on MPR is supported by Sarah Kinney Professional Real Estate Services, matching people with property for 21 years, Coldwell Banker Burnet, Crocus Hill Office.

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