Unattended Death and Biohazard Cleanup in Babbitt, MN

Babbitt is a city in St. Louis County in northeastern Minnesota, built near the eastern edge of the Mesabi Iron Range beside Birch Lake, and it was incorporated on September 12, 1956.

The city is named after Judge Kurnal R. Babbitt of New York City, a figure connected with the mining companies that developed the area.

Babbitt grew out of a taconite mine built by Armco and Republic Steel starting in 1944, after E. W. Davis of the University of Minnesota developed the process for crushing and separating iron from the hard, low-grade taconite rock.

Babbitt is a genuinely planned company town: Reserve Mining Company selected the townsite, retained Pace Associates of Chicago as planners, and had eighty new homes programmed for occupancy in 1952, with everything pre-planned and laid out before construction began.

Reserve Mining enlarged the old Mesabi Iron Company plant at Babbitt into a test plant in 1951-52, and it produced some of the world's first commercial taconite pellets there from 1952 to 1957 before full-scale production moved to Silver Bay.

The Babbitt area's mining story began with gold, not iron: in 1865 prospector Christian Weiland guided State Geologist Henry Eames through the region checking gold rumors near Lake Vermilion, and pointed out the iron ore outcroppings near present-day Babbitt along the way.

Cleveland-Cliffs' Northshore Mining operation still mines taconite at Babbitt, where its mine has operated since 1956, and ships the ore to its pellet plant at Silver Bay on Lake Superior.

Babbitt sprawls across about 107 square miles of forest and mine land - one of the largest municipal areas in Minnesota - despite having only 1,397 residents at the 2020 census.

The 2010 census counted 1,475 people in 707 households in Babbitt, and Census Bureau survey estimates show roughly 30 percent of its residents are 65 or older, a legacy of retirees who stayed after their mining careers.

Sitting only two portages from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Babbitt markets itself as a gateway where an iron-mining town meets Minnesota's canoe country.