24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Virginia, MN

Virginia is a city in St. Louis County in northeastern Minnesota, nicknamed the 'Queen City of the North' and considered the commercial center of the Mesabi Iron Range.

Virginia was laid out in March 1892, the year prospectors struck rich iron ore at the nearby Missabe Mountain Mine, and it incorporated in February 1895.

Virginia was named after the state of Virginia, the home state of a large share of the lumbermen who first settled the area.

Virginia's population was 8,421 at the 2020 census, down from 12,450 in 1970 as mining declined; the 2010 census counted 8,712 people living in 4,242 households.

Fires devastated Virginia in 1893 and again in 1900, but the city rebuilt both times, and its early commercial core survives as the Virginia Commercial Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places.

At its industrial peak, Virginia was said to have both the largest white pine sawmill in the world and the biggest ore-producing mine on the Mesabi Range, the Missabe Mountain Mine.

The Thomas Rukavina Memorial Bridge, which carries U.S. Highway 53 over the flooded Rouchleau Mine pit at Virginia, rises 204 feet — making it the tallest bridge in Minnesota.

The Highway 53 bridge opened in 2017 after the highway had to be moved off land reclaimed for mining, and the paved Mesabi Trail crosses the mine pit on the bridge.

Olcott Park, a 40-acre park named for Oliver Mining president William J. Olcott and formally opened in 1911, anchors Virginia's park system with its historic Olcott Park Greenhouse and a Great Depression-era fountain.

Just north of Virginia runs the Laurentian Divide, the continental divide separating water flowing to Hudson Bay from water bound for the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico.