Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Mountain Iron, MN

Mountain Iron is a city in St. Louis County in the heart of the Mesabi Range, founded in 1892 as a mining village in the former Nichols Township and named after the nearby Mountain Iron Mine.

The Merritt brothers made the first discovery of iron ore on the Mesabi Range near Mountain Iron in 1890, declaring it a "mountain of iron," and the Village of Mountain Iron was incorporated on October 17, 1892 — the same season the first shipment of ore left the Mountain Iron Mine.

The Mountain Iron Mine, opened in 1892, was the first mine on the Mesabi Range, which proved to be the largest iron ore deposit ever discovered in the United States; the mine was named a National Historic Landmark in 1968 and yielded more than 48 million gross tons of ore before closing in 1956.

Mountain Iron's official motto is "Taconite Capital of the World," and its local mine, Minntac, is owned by U.S. Steel — visitors can view the Minntac operation from an overlook just south of town.

The population of Mountain Iron was 2,878 at the 2020 census, in about 1,322 households, spread across a city of more than 70 square miles that includes mine lands and lakes.

Mountain Iron is part of the Iron Range Quad Cities, together with Virginia, Eveleth and Gilbert.

A 1915 village hall and an elegantly finished Carnegie Library marked the town's early prosperity, and a 1910 Baldwin S-4 switcher locomotive is on display downtown as a tribute to the railroads that hauled Mesabi ore.

The city celebrates its mining heritage each August with the Leonidas Merritt Days festival, named for the prospector whose 1890 ore discovery started the Mesabi Range boom.

The discovery at Mountain Iron set in motion events that made Minnesota the nation's largest producer of iron ore and helped make the United States the world's largest steel manufacturer — from 1892 to 1961 the Mesabi Range supplied more than half the ore mined in the United States.