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
Sorted by date Results 3007 - 3031 of 3909
When she was murdered, Jackie DeFoe joined a long list of Native American women who have been victims of violence. A 2016 National Institute of Justice report revealed that four in five American Indian (and Alaskan Native) women have experienced violence in their lifetime, and more than half have experienced physical violence by intimate partners. It’s an issue that touches everyone, said Cloquet’s Sheila Lamb, who sits on the statewide Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women task force and works...
A Cloquet man was charged with killing his girlfriend, Jackie DeFoe, her 20-month-old son, Kevin, and her unborn child in Sixth District Carlton County Court on Tuesday, March 10. Sheldon James Thompson, 33, faces two charges of second-degree murder and a third count of second-degree murder of an unborn child. The killings, disclosed Sunday morning by the Cloquet Police Department, rocked the communities of the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation and Cloquet, where the victims and the suspect lived....
Two national traditions will combine Sunday, March 15, at the annual Mojakka Cook-Off, when at least 15 area cooks will show off their best Finnish soups, all washed down with the buyer’s choice of green or purple beer. The cook-off starts at 1 p.m. at the historic NorthEastern Hotel on Dunlap Island in Cloquet. The mojakka and the purple beer pay homage to St. Urho’s Day, March 16, the day that St. Urho dined on a hearty bowl of the soup before heading out to rid the Finnish vineyards of a plague of grasshoppers. The green beer, of cou...
Dan Bremnes “Wherever I go” 2020 Spring tour and documentary screening is coming to Common Ground Coffee Bar & Deli at 103 Avenue C Sunday, March 15 starting at 7 p.m. Tickets are $15. This intimate acoustic performance will feature hit records “Wherever I Go” and “Up Again” as well as a screening of his documentary about the making of the “Wherever I Go” music video, which was filmed around the world over eight days. It’s a fam-ily-friendly performance....
Councilors nearly tabled a project that would repair some of the city's worst streets after a public hearing Thursday, March 5 revealed the biggest pothole in the project: attitudes about the planned addition of a sidewalk to Prospect Avenue between 14th and 22nd streets. On one side were numerous residents, many who live in homes that came with small front yards that would likely get smaller. On the other side were people advocating for pedestrian safety: representatives from the Cloquet Area F...
Esko residents learned that Canosia Road North of Highway 61 will be closed starting July 1 and into the fall for replacement of a bridge over the Midway River. The news about what is also known as Carlton County Road 1 came at Tuesday night’s Thomson Township annual town meeting, where a handful of residents joined township officials and employees reviewed the annual financial statement, heard from department heads, and discussed other town business. It was a 40-minute meeting at Thomson T...
Changes unfolding in the Carlton County Extension Office were laid out in a report presented by acting supervisor Donna Lekander at the Carlton County Committee of the Whole meeting March 3. The Extension program has been under intense scrutiny since Troy Salzer, longtime Carlton County/University of Minnesota Extension Service agriculture educator, left for another job. An initial evaluation of the Carlton County program showed a lack of supervision for staff working there and a need to set staff guidelines for their particular job. County...
A community meeting brainstorming solutions to financial issues in the Barnum School District aimed to bring people together Wednesday, March 4. A circle of 21 stakeholders, made up of three members of school personnel, students, parents, community members and support staff expressed their views about what needs to be changed in the Barnum School District now that the school board is discussing cuts in staff because of a deficit budget. Facilitators Laraine and Paul Mickelson of Mickelson Consulting led the discussion using a circle process,...
A former Barnum School District payroll employee who took — and paid back — $14,062 from the school’s food service fund pleaded guilty to theft last fall under the terms of a plea deal. Nancy Colleen Monfeldt, 58, was initially charged with embezzlement of public funds, one count of failure to pay over state funds and two counts of felony theft in March 2019. The embezzlement and state funds charges were dismissed when she pleaded guilty to the theft charges. According to the criminal complaint, then Superintendent David Bottem contacted the Ca...
The famed rodent of Punxsutawney Pennsylvania did not see his shadow this year, prognosticating an early spring for 2020 and right here at the Food Farm we had our first picnic of the year… in the greenhouse. The thermostat said 94 degrees on Sunday afternoon and some of the smaller amongst us were in tank tops. There are other signs of spring on the farm. We have onions in the ground, the bees have been spring cleaning their hives, we got our seeds inventoried, and we’ve been busy telling the...
Reduce, reuse, recycle … it’s stated so much that you probably give it little actual thought and instead just let it go in one ear and out the other. Now there is nothing I have negative to say about the three R’s, as it outlines the exact concepts and hierarchy we need to strive for: giving greatest priority to reducing our overall waste creation in the first place then looking toward responsible management through reuse and recycling. But the three R’s don’t explain the benefits gained by...
After much discussion on Facebook pages and in local coffee shops over the past two weeks, the Lumberjack logo debate has been settled, at least as far as the Cloquet School District is concerned. During Monday’s School Board meeting, Cloquet Superintendent Michael Cary pointed to the the Pine Knot News story about the history of the Lumberjack mascot logo, and said he and others had talked to many of the same people quoted in the story. “Everything we can find points to the fact that the Lum...
Carlton School District Superintendent Gwen Carman announced to the school board this week that she is seeking positions in other school districts. She said she had accepted an invitation to interview for a superintendent job in Mora. “I have also applied to other school districts,” Carman wrote. Carman is one of six finalists for the Mora job, which had 26 applicants. The school board there was expected to interview candidates Thursday and today. The Mora superintendent is retiring. Carman is in the throes of consolidation discussions wit...
The Cloquet mock trial team finished 14th out of 16 teams competing in the Mock Trial State Tournament in St. Paul last week. Madelynn Dostal was named an All-State attorney and Ian Gunelson was named an All-State witness for their performances. Coach Corinne Gornick-Heehn said the Cloquet team held its own against teams that were coach by "literally, a team of attorneys." "I was so proud of my team," Heehn said. "They argued smart and hard ... against teams that went on to take third and...
The Cloquet Ripsaw Robotics team, members pictured above at the Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center, was the top Carlton County finisher in the FIRST Robotics regional competition in Duluth last week. Cloquet finished 10th in Lake Superior Regional that pits the most experienced programs against each other for a chance at moving on to national competition. Cloquet finished just outside the group moving on. The team did win the Safety Award, a technical achievement that teams covet. The...
Ninety-five percent or about 143 million households in the country will receive an initial invitation to respond to the 2020 Census in their mailboxes between March 12 and 20. The U.S. Census Bureau released informational copies today of the invitations, the enclosed materials, and the subsequent reminders households will receive. These materials can help the public know what to expect and avoid potential scams. Households are encouraged to respond when they receive their invitation. Depending...
Carlton County went big for Democratic candidate Joe Biden on the DFL side, and President Trump on the Republican side in Tuesday's presidential primary election. The results here reflected results across Minnesota. With Trump the only name on the ballot for the Republican Party, he received 97.8 percent of the votes cast by Republicans. On the Democratic ballot, the voting results were more varied, but also quite decisive. Joe Biden got a total of 2,057 votes (45.2 percent) in Carlton County,...
The question of who designed the Cloquet High School Lumberjack mascot logo leads almost immediately to another question: Which logo? There have been dozens of iterations of the Cloquet Lumberjack. Yearbooks dating back to at least the 1940s, maybe even further, show depictions of lumberjacks. The 1948 White Pine featured a hulking, thickly bearded, flannel-clad lumberjack on its cover, and another drawing of the lumberjack fishing inside. In the 1960s, a more exotic lumberjack began appearing...
Being green has its benefits. Just ask the folks at Sappi. What started almost 20 years ago as an effort to prolong the life of the on-site landfill at the Cloquet paper mill has turned into an environmental success story that goes beyond Minnesota, even beyond North America. Sappi North America - and particularly the Cloquet mill - was one of 41 companies recognized globally last month with a SEAL Environmental Initiative Award. It all started with the landfill. With the Cloquet mill adding...
The Carlton VFW would like its American flag back. Carlton VFW manager Cody Solem said the bartender at the veterans organization at 124 Chestnut in Carlton realized something was wrong with the flags on a Sunday morning a few days after a break-in Feb. 5 at the Four Seasons Sports Complex in Carlton. Solem said when he got to work, he found that someone had stolen the U.S. flag, but left the POW flag behind. “The rope was cut straight across, and our flag was attached using carabiners and grommets,” Solem said. “If it was just the wind rippi...
After initially voting against paying a professional lobbyist to help persuade the Minnesota Legislature to make school consolidations eligible for greater state aid, the Wrenshall school board met early Monday morning and reversed that decision. Wrenshall and Carlton school districts will each pay half of the $25,000 cost of hiring lobbyist Reid LeBeau. A successful effort in St. Paul could lead to state funding that would pay 40 percent of the estimated $38 million in school improvements. Both districts agreed they will not continue...
Most of Cloquet and close to 5,000 Minnesota Power customers in northern Carlton County were without power for one to three hours Friday. Like in the movie “Ice Age,” the whole problem started with a squirrel. According to a Minnesota Power tweet, the company eventually determined there was a squirrel in the substation that serves the city of Cloquet. Squirrels can serve as electrical conduits to transformers, throwing the system offline. The outage began at approximately 10:45 am Friday and affected much of Cloquet, Scanlon, plus Gnesen, Twi...
Two drug overdoses — one in Cloquet and one in Carlton — on Monday, March 2, may be linked to a spate of seven overdoses in Duluth. The patients in the two Carlton County cases were a 20-year-old man from Superior and a 53-year-old woman from Cloquet. Both were transported by ambulance to a local hospital for treatment. As members of the Lake Superior Gang and Violent Crimes Task Force, Cloquet interim police chief Derek Randall said the CPD was notified of an alleged batch of heroin containing fentanyl that the task force believes is connected...
The Cloquet Area Chamber of Commerce honored businesses large and small along with its volunteer of the year at its annual meeting and banquet Thursday, Feb. 27 in the Otter Creek Event Center at the Black Bear Casino Resort. For 67 years, the Cloquet Area Chamber has recognized the significant contributions that area individuals and businesses make to the local, state and national economies with the presentation of awards and recognition to its member businesses each year. Award winners for...
Don't give up, Duluth cartoonist, illustrator and author Chris Monroe told a room full of third-graders at Washington Elementary School last month. She walked the kids through various versions of Chico Bon Bon, the star of her "Monkey with a Toolbelt" series of children's books. "He looks like a horror monkey," said one child of an earlier version. Monroe did lots and lots of sketches before she arrived at her true vision of her tool-belt wearing, fix-it-or-build-it monkey. "Eventually I found h...
