Ghost Town’s Houses Get Chance at Life

A prefabricated company town that arrived on flatbed trucks 23 years ago is leaving the same way, Ray Huseby says.

Huseby bought the fire hall, the community center and 22 houses in Taconite Harbor as an investment, and he plans to sell the buildings, which cost from $210 to $4,000, as homes once he decides where to put them.

“He moves houses like other people move cars,” said his daughter Cindy Lubich, who is in on the deal.

The ghost town, a relic from the booming 1950s that had become a headache for LTV Steel Mining Co., will be moved away house by house on Huseby’s rig. He has until July 1 to finish.

LTV Steel inherited the town from Erie Mining Co. in 1987 and is happy to be rid of it after local laws stopped it from literally giving away the homes.

Huseby and Lubich plan to fix up and resell most of their holdings, which have been appraised at $11,000 to $15,000. Taconite’s two other houses were sold to other bidders.

Huseby says how much he invests in the 15-ton buildings depends on how much money they will command, whether he buys lots and builds foundations and where they end up.

Toivo Maki, superintendent of operations at LTV Steel, said that in a large community such as Minneapolis-St. Paul the bungalows might fetch $60,000 apiece.

Dead towns are nothing new in hard-pressed northeastern Minnesota. Erected in 1957 by Eire Mining 50 miles south of Canada on the shores of Lake Superior, the town wasn’t incorporated and never had its own mailing address or school.

Taconite Harbor was on the map, but not on the census rolls.

“It was never a town, exactly,” Maki said. “I’m not sure what it was.”

A line of houses facing each other on a street squeezed between the highway and the lake, the town was built to house the workers needed to run the docks that handled the taconite pellets bound for the steel mills. It was a cog in the system that fed the nation’s appetite for automobiles from Detroit.

For $400 down and $110 a month, a couple could buy a house from the company and start a family in a three- or four-bedroom bungalow. Company docks and the now-defunct power plant were a few hundred yards away.

Later, the auto and steel industries sagged and the demand for taconite, a low-grade iron ore, plummeted. Today, only a few workers are needed to work the dock; the last family left Taconite Harbor about 19 months ago.