Harry's Gang: History is a trip at the library

The Cloquet library is a godsend to parents in the summer. No sooner did we walk in last week than several kids greeted Tommy and Patrick, apparently friends of theirs from school. Soon, the girls were playing with Eleanor and the boys were looking up sports information.

I found a great book written by Paul Fahlstrom, who grew up here and wrote about his hometown from his home in Maryland. The book, “Old Cloquet, Minnesota: White Pine Capital of the World” was published in 1997, and the copy on the shelf was pretty worn and tattered.

He’s written several books about Cloquet, but this one is pre-fire, a short history of the town growing as a lumber center before the 1918 fires. It’s a good explanation of why Cloquet was called “The Wood City” and it documents some of the growing pains it experienced growing up.

For example, Cloquet’s portion of the St. Louis River is wide and deep, the perfect spot to stop logs before trying to get them through the rapids in Jay Cooke Park and on to Duluth. There were numerous attempts at figuring out how to get the logs to Duluth, including spillways, canals and even legislation, but it just didn’t make sense: it was easy to float the logs out of the woods and down the Cloquet River and the St. Louis River, but no one had a really good idea of how to get them past Cloquet.

That apparently annoyed the rich Duluth business interests.

“The Duluth lumbermen then turned their attention to other methods of getting their vast pine holdings to Duluth,” the book reads. A town was proposed at the mouth of the Cloquet River, to be called St. Louis, where logs would be trucked then carried via railroad to Duluth.

“This was another blatant effort by the Duluth interests to cut off Cloquet and drive them out of business,” Fahlstrom wrote.

Lumber barons in the area realized that the valuable timber would soon all be cut for lumber, but that a paper mill was more sustainable long-term, as it would use more-quickly growing trees.

Fahlstrom’s book relies heavily on historical accounts of daily events as chronicled by the Pine Knot, the local paper that is the inspiration for this Pine Knot News. In fact, Fahlstrom wrote, “The first pulp was ground April 1, 1899 and first paper made April 8th and was immediately hauled to the Pine Knot to be turned into a newspaper.” Now, that’s history.

Another chapter described a bar brawl on Dunlap Island in 1894. From the news story in the Pine Knot: “Seven Finns, with names that would fracture any ordinary jaw, were engaged.” I laughed out loud. With a name like “Radosevich,” I can understand how some in the 1890s had difficulty with the double vowels and inflections of the Finnish language.

I love the library. Even in this age of limited reading and the fear of books becoming obsolete, the local library continues to do what libraries really do: provide space and a forum for people to share knowledge and congregate.

Pete Radosevich is the publisher of the Pine Knot News and an attorney in Esko. He can be reached at [email protected]