A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
A hometown newspaper with a local office, local owners & lots of local news
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A fly on the wall at the office of the Pine Knot News, during a meeting of the minds discussing year-in-review stories, may not have contained itself in screaming: "Covid. Done." But, being a fly with no means to discernibly communicate with humans, no one here at the office heard the plea. Not that we needed to. 2020. Covid. Pandemic. Restricted socializing. Masks. Illness. Death. Loss. Or, as we displayed in our largest headline of the year on March 20: Everything has changed. Yes, fly, 2020...
Gene Shank most often got up before his wife, Linda, did. She had allergies, and at night it could keep her from getting to sleep right away. Gene would let the dogs outside at their home next to the Moose Horn River in Barnum. He'd putz around, get on his computer. It was the "normal life of retired people," he said. Linda was a loud snorer - "she rattled the windows" - and he relied on that rumbling to know she was at least getting her sleep. By mid-morning, he'd start preparing the stinging...
The good news for the Carlton school district is that there were no surprises and things stayed pretty much the same as years before in the annual audit released Monday night. That’s also the bad news as the district continues to face rising costs associated with more students living within the district choosing to go to school somewhere else. The district is not getting “economies of scale,” reported Matt Mayer from BerganKDV, which performed the audit. He was reporting at the final regular meeting of the school board for the year. In 2016,...
The Carlton school board this week firmed up its position when it comes to the current standoff with the Wrenshall board and possible consolidation between the two neighboring districts. On Monday, the Carlton board agreed in a committee of the whole discussion that it would vote at its regular meeting Monday on the question of debt sharing should a consolidation take place. Should the board vote to not share debt among all taxpayers in a new district, consolidation could be off the table. At least half of the six-member board indicated Monday...
Jerry Anderson, the last surviving starter on the first boys basketball team from Carlton County to reach the state tournament, died Tuesday at age 83. Anderson was a star on the 1955 Esko team that won the consolation championship. The success of the Eskomos preceded runs by Cloquet and Carlton in subsequent tournaments in the late 1950s and 1960s. Pine Knot News writer Steve Korby wrote about Anderson this past October, after fellow starter Don Terwey died on Sept. 30. Anderson said he met...
The Carlton school board voted Monday night to hire a company to provide construction cost estimates on transforming South Terrace Elementary into a facility that could serve three more grades, up to grade 8, or serve all students through 12th grade. The move comes as the board has discussed its options the past month since state funding fell through this year for a consolidation with Wrenshall. The South Terrace studies won’t be new to Carlton taxpayers. The district did similar studies leading up to a failed referendum in 2017 to expand t...
There’s good news and no news regarding the two History Mystery photos from last week. David Haugen submitted pictures of a fireplace sitting alone in a woods in Cloquet and a “gondola cable car” along the St. Louis River near Scanlon. There is nothing to report on the cable car, yet, but we’re working on it. There is plenty to report on the fireplace. Cloquet’s Julie Johanson provided a clue that unlocked a lot of history about the structure found in a slice of woods east of the playgroun...
Reader David Haugen admits he’s lived in Cloquet for only 15 years, so may have missed an era of general knowledge about some physical structures in the area that have puzzled him for some time. He recently submitted two photos for History Mystery. One is a fireplace, without a structure around it, found in the woods just east of the playground at Hilltop Park in Cloquet. What gives? The other is what Haugen refers to as a “gondola cable car” apparatus on the St. Louis River, just south of wh...
When Jeff Walther was transferred to the intensive care unit at Essentia-St. Mary's Hospital in Duluth, he was greeted by nurse Amanda Valentine. She would spend 16 hours with him that day as the pastor at Esko's St. Matthews Lutheran Church struggled with the effects of acquiring the Covid-19 virus. "When I say it was an absolute joy caring for him that day, it was," Valentine wrote to the family. "He was so nice, pleasant, and funny, and he made my double go by so quickly." Valentine had...
After five special sessions since the regular session ended in May, the Minnesota Legislature last week passed a $1.9 billion bonding bill. It was signed Wednesday by Gov. Tim Walz. The bonding will allow for public works projects across the state, including a $7.5 million grant to Twin Lakes Township to design and construct a water main from Carlton County along the Minnesota Highway 210 corridor to Interstate 35. The waterline will alleviate fears about wells contaminated with arsenic and also offer an expected economic boost to the business...
As the Minnesota Legislature breathed its last gasps of air of the 2020 session, Carlton County can find some wins and some big losses when contemplating what became a session extended by five months with mostly unproductive special sessions since May and until this week. A school district consolidation will have to wait. A long-planned waterline project is a go, as is a grant for the county jail to explore increasing services for female offenders. On the flip side, the county will have to wait for permission to ask county voters to allow a...
The dynamics of this year's general election brings to mind a question: Is it the pandemic or the rhetoric? Minnesotans are requesting absentee ballots in record numbers for the Nov. 3 election - "Off the charts," as secretary of state Steve Simon said when early voting began Sept. 18. After an August statewide primary that saw 60 percent of the vote come via absentee or mail-in vote, the general election is sure to keep the trend going. In Carlton County, absentee and early in-person voting is...
People coming down with Covid-19 is not the problem handcuffing the Cloquet school district. It’s the waiting for test results when someone shows symptoms. That was the assessment this week from superintendent Mike Cary as the district continues to have problems replacing staff with an “absolute dire need” for substitutes. A typical scenario, Cary told the school board at its regular meeting Monday, is a teacher has a family member with symptoms. That person gets tested and there is a three- to five-day wait for results. The entire famil...
Wrenshall superintendent Kim Belcastro didn’t need to say it. Her face told all. “It’s been a tough week,” she told the school board Tuesday night during a special meeting. The day before, she announced that the school would be going to full distance learning because of staff shortages related to Covid-19. It means there will be no on-campus classes for elementary students who had been attending twice a week and high school students once a week. The special meeting Tuesday resulted in school board members agreeing that pre-kin...
Reports to the school boards at Carlton and Wrenshall this week showed that the two small districts had relatively drama-free starts to the year despite intense pressure due to Covid-19 pandemic protocols. In Wrenshall, the major hitch remains the continuing construction project to improve the heating and air conditioning in the elementary portion of the K-12 building. It is expected that the project will wrap up by early November. Superintendent Kim Belcastro reported to the board that enrollment is slightly down from past years, at 367...
Two 20-something women have matching tattoos using the Latin words attributed to Julius Caesar: "Veni, vidi, vici," which translates to "I came, I saw, I conquered." It seems a fitting phrase for these driven women who came from humble beginnings and are or have marched their way through advanced college degrees in highly analytical fields. But they live 1,400 miles apart and, until this past July, had never met. They hadn't even known of the other's existence until luck - and genetic...
A sloppy kiss between a moist, unstable air mass and a veering cold front led to a stormy afternoon and evening last Friday, Aug. 14, across Carlton County. Strong downdraft winds snapped trees and unrooted others. Power lines went down, causing outages, particularly in the Carlton area and south although there were also lines down in Thomson Township. In the western part of the county, near Wright and Cromwell, low-level tornadoes were suspected but unconfirmed by the National Weather Service....
There was a passionate debate during a Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game at Veterans Park Tuesday, not to be mistaken as part of the nearby picnic for Carlton County Republicans. Nicholas Devriendt-Ledous, at left, in hat, is a mentor for Cloquet's REACH program. He and William Heyer, standing at right, gestured to each other as Edward Schulstrom, seated at left, and Shane Lavanki listened. REACH has been sponsoring weekly ventures in the park for outdoor activities....
There are outliers among Carlton County schools, those that won’t be coming back this fall with all of their students. So far, students in Esko, Carlton, Cromwell-Wright, Moose Lake and Barnum will likely go back to school en masse next month if the number of positive Covid-19 cases remains low. Decisions have already been made by some boards or have been recommended. Cloquet won’t make a final decision until Aug. 24, when more numbers come in on the number of coronavirus cases in the county. Wrenshall, by virtue of a delayed construction proje...
The bridge replacement project at the Midway River just north of Esko in Thomson Township on Carlton County Road 1 remains on schedule to be completed by early October, the county engineering division told the Pine Knot News. The project has had few delays since it began in late June, said assistant county engineer Rick Norrgard, who was at the site with an inspector Tuesday, the same day these pictures were taken. The project has cut off Esko schools from the Esko Sports Complex - save for a...
An August scramble like no other is on across Carlton County this August as schools prepare to reopen for the year. School boards, staff and administrators are meeting this week and next to make almost-final decisions after it was announced last week by Gov. Tim Walz that districts will have discretion on how school days will go while still in the grips of the Covid-19 pandemic. This week, more fodder was tossed in as the Minnesota State High School League on Tuesday moved the volleyball and foo...
A petition duel continued this week on the website Change.org considering the use of the nickname "Eskomos" for the Esko school district. Both begun by students at Esko High School, one petition says a name change should be considered while the other says to leave the name alone. It joins a chorus of debate in a time of great social upheaval and awareness. This month, the Canadian Football League team in Edmonton announced it would stop using its Eskimos nickname. Earlier this year, the company...
As a pandemic summer heats up meteorologically, so has the national rhetoric around how school districts will start classes in August and September. Normally sleepy and short meetings of school boards across Carlton County have become hours-long discussions on what school days will look like in the fall. Committees of staff have formed and ramped up planning in the past few weeks as an announcement is expected Monday from state leaders on how things will proceed. While Covid-19 cases in...
The Carlton school board decided on Monday to go it alone on a $3,000 study that would determine what district residents would pay in taxes if a consolidation with Wrenshall should ever come to fruition. The financial impact study would pinpoint how taxes would be affected for residents in both districts as they put fund balances and debts together. It’s something Carlton and Wrenshall board members have said should have been done in the process of providing information to residents about the consolidation. On Monday, Carlton members said g...
Superintendent John Engstrom pressed hard and Carlton school board members pushed back. In the end, they seemed to have come to some clearer idea of what the district's future might look like, consolidation with Wrenshall or not. It was an interesting yin and yang Monday night as the new superintendent gave his take on the state of the consolidation process and information he'd like to acquire before moving forward. He also urged the board to plot its course should no bonding money come from...
