The Development of Travel and Tourism

The Tower Depot served as a transportation resource for the Tower-Soudan area, but its main role was that its construction allowed early access to, and promotion of, the northern Minnesota lake region. After automobiles were invented and highways built starting in the 1930’s, much of the tourism for the area and statewide became highway-dependent. However, during the 50 years prior to that, Tower (and later Ely) were important early outposts due to their convenient rail access, with service of up to three trains a day. Tower bolstered this service with a busy city harbor, adjoining the depot, where passengers could disembark and then utilize boat services to get to Lake Vermilion’s thriving lakeside resorts, many of which were only accessible by water.

Thus, the significance of the Tower Historic Depot, now a museum, is that it put the Lake Vermilion area on the tourist map many decades before tourism became an important industry in the State of Minnesota. The Historic Train Depot is an important and symbolic piece of architecture that helped facilitate that early development of the resort and tourism industry especially on Lake Vermilion throughout the early part of the twentieth century.

Accessing the Area in the Early Years 

Lake Vermilion was an important early Native American landmark in what would become St. Louis County.  First settled by the Sioux, the area was later taken over by the Ojibwe, who still maintain the Bois Forte reservation in an area on the southern shore of the lake. The Native Americans accessed the area by canoes, as did, later on, the French voyageur fur traders, starting in the 1700’s.

St. Louis County was established by territorial legislation in 1855 and 1856, the county is named for the St. Louis River, which traverses much of the county before coursing into Lake Superior. The county seat is Duluth, Minnesota, established in 1856.

Eleven years later, in October, 1865, geologist Henry H. Eames completed the initiation of a survey of the mineral wealth present in the Lake Vermilion area. Soon thereafter, he heard rumors about a valuable gold strike on the shores of the lake.  The news of gold at Lake Vermilion spread and a St. Paul newspaper dispatched a special correspondent to the Vermilion gold field. That spurred hundreds of men, including recently discharged civil war veterans, to make their way to Duluth, where they purchased food and supplies for the trek north to the supposed gold fields. The Lake Vermilion Gold Rush was on!

A land trail to get to the gold was primarily used by the prospectors that came in a northwesterly direction from out of Duluth. During the winter of 1865-66, many of the prospectors were employed by the mining companies to break open a road from Duluth to Pike Bay of Lake Vermilion. This road followed in part an old Indian trail from the Head of the Lakes. The improved trail stretched 85 miles to the north and in time, became known as the Old Vermilion Trail. At first only a winter road, it was improved to be used year-round in 1868-69 by George R. Stuntz who directed a resurvey and construction project financed in part by government funds.

The first non-native settlement in the Lake Vermilion area was Winston City, located at the southern shore of Lake Vermilion (three quarters of a mile northeast of the Saint Louis County Marker at the intersection of County Road 526, off of Minnesota 169 (State Highway 169), on the right when traveling west on County Road 526, off of Minnesota 169), where the gold prospectors created a log cabin and shack community. In 1866 it boasted several stores, a hotel, four saloons and a post office. But gold was not found in quantities sufficient to cover the cost of mining. The “gold rush” was short-lived (1865-1867) and the area was abandoned. In 1867, the last of the disappointed miners deserted their gold diggings and Winston City shortly became the first ghost town of the Vermilion Range.

The gold rush was the genesis of further discoveries of valuable minerals around Lake Vermilion. In 1875, George R, Stuntz “discovered” (the Native Americans had already told a former US Government blacksmith, N.A. Posey, about the presence of iron in 1863), large deposits of iron ore in what we now know as Soudan. A financier and entrepreneur from Philadelphia, a millionaire named Charlemagne Tower was contacted by politician and Duluth community leader George C. Stone to consider looking into a possible investment. Tower felt that the rich deposits of iron on the southeastern shore of Lake Vermilion, might predicate a potential iron mining industry. He became interested in the discovery and began to acquire the land in the vicinity of where the iron ore was found.

In 1883 miners began to arrive and settle in Soudan, where Charlemagne Tower had decided to develop an iron mine. Since his initial introduction to the potential of the iron ore discovered near Soudan, it had taken Charlemagne Tower 9 years to negotiate for and purchase hundreds of acres of land, create a mining company and construct a rail line to transport the ore from Soudan to a port on Lake Superior. Once the mine was finally open and ore was being extracted, the little mining outpost in Soudan grew from a few men into a “company town” dominated by Charlemagne Tower’s mine and his very successful Minnesota Iron Company. Two miles away, the town of Tower was beginning to be built. Miners and their families lived in Soudan, Tower became the residential community of choice for the mining company’s executives, as well as local business owners.

“The town of Tower, consciously designed as the business district to Soudan’s almost exclusively residential and mine-owned premises, grew quickly; it was platted in 1882, incorporated in 1884, and declared a city in 1889. Within a few short years, the town became a city and had a robust commercial district, including general stores, groceries, confectionaries, dairies, bakeries, hardware stores, blacksmith shops, jewelry stores, liveries, photography studios, drug stores, restaurants, hotels, and as many as thirty-three saloons”, according to Marshall Helmberger in an article he wrote in 2005 in the Timberjay.

The Establishment of the Rail Road

An integral asset of both Soudan and Tower had been the establishment of a rail line to the area, the Duluth and Iron Range (D&IR) Rail Road, which was built and owned by Charlemagne Tower. The D&IR rail cars carried iron ore from the Soudan Mine over to Lake Superior’s Agate Bay, now known as Two Harbors, where it was loaded onto cargo ships and thence carried to refineries, first in Chicago and later in Indiana, Michigan and Ohio.

Tower’s first railroad depot was built sometime between 1884 and 1886 and was, for all intents and purposes, a freight depot for ore and timber. As it was the town’s only depot, early Sanborn maps refer to it as a “passenger depot” (in the 1921 Sanborn, after the construction of the passenger depot, it is referred to as the “D&IR Freight Depot.”) It was also used for storage, and housed the telephone exchange.

The building was constructed on the western edge of the town, along what is now the intersection of Highway 169 and Cedar Street, with spurs running to the Soudan Mine for iron, and to Hoo-Doo Point for timber. The building itself was extremely modest, a long, narrow, one-story wood frame building with a projecting bay at the side façade and a covered platform. It was unadorned and utilitarian.

Besides the rich iron ore deposits, there were endless forests in the area and a nation-wide demand for their timber. This gave birth to a burgeoning lumber industry in the Lake Vermilion area. Though the Minnesota Iron Company built the railroad for mine access, it became equally important for timber. Sanborn Maps from 1888, 1892, 1904 and 1909 show significant lumber resources The first sawmill in the area was built in Tower in 1882. Three of the largest sawmills were the C.L. White Lumber Company, the Howe Lumber Company, and the Tower Lumber Company. These companies had their own railroad services built by the logging networks and tied them into the main railroads. Most were near the East Two Rivers harbor, though one was on Lake Vermilion’s nearby HooDoo Point, and had its own spur. This also inspired additional companies to build rail services to transport lumber, and soon nearby Weyerhauser Lumber was estimated to have 1,300 miles of its own rail line between Lake Vermilion and Rainy Lake.

The lumber companies employed as many as two thousand men during the winter months in their many logging camps.  Timber was cut on islands on Lake Vermilion, at Trout Lake and elsewhere on the lakeshores. As the logs were cut they were then hauled to “landings” on the lake and when spring came and the lake opened up again, the logs were assembled into large rafts and towed down the lake by strong, steam tugboats to the mill on Pike Bay or to saw mills at Hoodoo Point and on the East Two Rivers harbor.

The Tower Lumber Company, operating from 1900 to 1909, employed some five hundred men in their sawmill, planning mill, and lumber yard.  It was a year-round operation.  The processed lumber was shipped from the D&IR’s rustic and utilitarian Freight Depot at what is now the intersection of Highway 169 and Cedar Street in Tower. This was Tower’s first railroad station.

As the railroad lumber and iron ore shipping businesses grew, Lake Vermilion began to attract tourists and the area quickly began to evolve as a tourist destination. In response, the D&IR, perhaps sensing an expansion opportunity, turned its attention to the new and lucrative possibility of— passenger fares. The D&IR thus became an early and ardent supporter of Lake Vermilion tourism, and beginning in 1908 General Passenger Agent H. Johnson initiated an extensive promotion of the Lake Vermilion area as a tourist destination.

The D&IR PR Campaign

The public relations advertising campaign for tourists to come to Lake Vermilion was both extensive and comprehensive, including internal employee publications, railroad-produced promotional literature, brochures produced in association with other interested parties such as the Vermilion Boat and Outing Company, and smaller pieces such as railroad timetables.

A 1914 publication by the Vermilion Boat and Outing Company, entitled “Beautiful Lake Vermilion”, could not have been more clear about the relationship between the railroad, the harbor, and the resorts. “To get to Lake Vermilion,” it instructs, “Go to Duluth, Minn., take the D&IR train at 7:30am or 3:15pm for Tower, Minn., 100 miles from Duluth. To get from Tower to Cottages or Hotels — Take one of the Vermilion Boat & Outing Co.’s launches, the ‘Scout’ or the ‘Sally,’ at their dock at the depot.”

The publication then helpfully lists cabin costs, launch rates, and leisure suggestions, ending with the entreaty on its back cover:

Do you long for the Pines and the Lakes? Feel the “Call of the Wild?”
Want to camp out? Or live in a cottage? Catch a fine string of fish? 

Sleep under the “murmuring pines” where the nights are cool? Get rid of your hay fever or weak lungs?
See deer and moose in their native haunts?
Paddle a birch bark through an almost unexplored country? 

If you do, come to
Beautiful Lake Vermilion
In the Pine Forests of Northern Minnesota

A D&IR promotional brochure more prosaically explained:

Lake Vermilion is reached from Duluth by the Duluth and Iron Range Railroad Company, which runs first-class all-steel trains twice daily, including observation and café cars, all of which add to the pleasure of the trip. Boat companies at Tower run a daily service to all points on the lake.

 

Primary attractions included swimming, boating, fishing, picnicking, scenery, and hunting — some of the same attractions that early industries, such as the mines, had used to attract workers to the area. However, with access to most lakeside recreational areas in the rest of the state of Minnesota, limited due to a lack of railroad lines, Lake Vermilion was uniquely situated to take early advantage of the demand for leisure tourism. In this way, the D&IR, lead the growth of the travel and tourism industry decades ahead of other Minnesota recreational centers, and played a significant role in jump-stating Minnesota resort tourism.

The New Tower Railroad Passenger Depot

To develop this business, one thing was clear — to meet the increased customer service needs of a tourism-based economy, Tower and the Lake Vermilion gateway would need a more welcoming depot. Though the original depot had included passenger service, its style and functionality displayed its freight-oriented roots, and its location was not ideal for expansion, parkland, or water access. Coincidentally, he Tower Lumber Company closed its doors in 1909, decreasing the necessity of a freight railroad to serve Tower. The D&IR decided to create an upgraded facility in Tower for arriving passengers.

In February, 1916 The Tower Weekly News announced, “New Depot Assured.” Later that year, on July 21, the Tower News asserted:

“With the present growing passenger service of the railroad and with a future outlook that is good, a new depot is needed. Lake Vermilion has just begun to pull. Each year from now on the crowds will increase. The new depot will properly greet the new arrivals and care for their needs in a first-class manner.”

The new depot was built in parkland just west of the Tower downtown and approximately 250 feet southeast of the old freight depot. The new facility provided expanded services and amenities for the rail line passengers– a Baggage Room located off of the Men’s Waiting Room at the northwest end of the depot that some freight capacity, though presumably larger freight was handled at the terminus of the spurs. There was a ticket counter and office in the middle a telephone office on the second floor and a separate Ladies Waiting Room and public restrooms.

The new depot, built adjacent to the “Tower Harbor,”–a widening in the East Two Rivers waterway–and near the town’s historic 1901 McKinley monument, offered closer access to water transport onto Lake Vermilion. From here passengers could disembark from the train, stroll to the harbor, and be ferried by one of the boat services to Lake Vermilion resorts.

Lake Vermilion Tourism

If an established railway was the first major incentive to tourism, the relationship of the passenger depot to the Tower Harbor was the practical element that really made it work. Access to Lake Vermilion’s 1,200+ miles of shoreline had been primarily by boat since the first Native Americans plied the water with birch bark canoes.

In 1884, Louis Mosier constructed the first rough, split-log steamboat on Vermilion and by the turn of the century it had been supplanted by seven others, with another three added in the early 1900s. The railroad hastened this development, as large steamboats and their parts could be imported from Duluth and the Twin Cities. Gas boats were introduced at the turn of the century, and speedboats soon became popular. The Tower Harbor, which had been established in 1865, provided relatively easy water-based transportation to the lake’s long shoreline and 365 islands, without the delay and expense of roads and supporting infrastructure.

The Tower Harbor was well-developed by the mid-1910s, including 40+ wet boathouses, 2 ice houses, 2 soft drink storage houses, and 6 multi-vehicle automobile garages. Major boating liveries included the Vermilion Boat and Outing Company, Aronson’s, Bystrom Boat Works, and Gruben Brothers. These companies operated everything from steamboats to speedboats. In addition to passenger service, they carried freight and the mail.

The rails brought people to Tower and the boats provided transportation to the plethora of resorts located on Lake Vermilion. The first resorts opened at landings that had formerly served homesteaders and their farms. Goodwill’s (now Muskego Point Resort), built in 1894, is usually cited as the first resort on the lake, followed by Joyce’s Landing (now Pehrson Lodge) in 1900/1902, Grandview Resort (circa 1905), and a moose-hunting camp known as Hunter’s Lodge (1907). The Vermilion Boat and Outing Company opened in 1908 and built cabins with boat service on Gold Island, followed by another development on Isle of Pines soon after and the famous Hotel Idlewilde in the mid-teens. The lake also had abundant private homes, as well as company-owned properties such as the Stuntz Bay boathouses, where the land was owned by the mine but leased to employees to build boathouses starting in 1884.

The Development of the Tourism Industry

After the new Tower Train Passenger Depot was built, the PR campaign continued at full blast. Brochures included extensive graphics, including photos of the scenery and of the trains’ luxuries, as well as stylized drawings of lakeshores and leisure activities. The D&IR even renamed the line the “Vermilion Route,” running from Saint Paul’s Union Depot to Ely.

Descriptions in these D&IR brochures tended towards the picturesque, describing “miles and miles one may wander along undulating river banks and winding shores and scarcely see a sign of man’s habitation” or, as in the 1923 Lake Vermilion, Nature’s Playground publication, “Man with his instruments of progress has not as yet conquered the wilds of Lake Vermilion and marred its virginal beauty.” 

The area was advertised widely, with tourists coming from Minnesota but also the upper Midwest in general, particularly Iowa and even Chicago. Much of the Chicago contingent was thought to be related to the influence of evangelist Dr. Preston Bradley, founder of the People’s Church in Chicago. Bradley’s summer home on Black Duck Island, built in the 1920s, was said to draw many followers to the area. Others came for health reasons: the region was advertised as providing relief from late summer allergies, among other health benefits. The title of the D&IR’s “Over the Old Vermilion Trail” brochure contained articles that proclaimed the area “Unexcelled for Hay Fever”.

Outdoor sports such as boating and fishing were the main lure, and the trophies of the hunters and fisherman who came to Lake Vermilion produced some rather unorthodox baggage leaving the Tower Passenger Station. A local resident, Frank Franson, remembers deer being shipped home by rail during hunting season. “I can remember the game warden John Peil, checking the deer to make sure they were legally tagged before they were loaded into a boxcar. Then there were the fish during the summer,” Franson continues, “when I worked at Grand View Resort in the late 1940s, I packed many fish boxes with walleyes that I had gilled and gutted. Aronson’s mail boat would pick them up and haul them across the lake and deliver them to the depot. Most of the fish were shipped to cities in Iowa and Illinois.”

In 1923 C. M. Bahr optimistically stated in, “Lake Vermilion, Nature’s Playground”, “Time is coming when we will have resorts of a class equal to those in Florida and California, and at the same time preserve our wilderness”. The railroad publications upheld these claims, unabashedly proclaiming that Lake Vermilion was “a wilderness utopia”, and, as a result, even more resorts and private properties were built on the lake.

The peak period for Lake Vermillion resorts was the 1920s, when a 1926 description tallied “nineteen resorts on the lake, with accommodations for over nine hundred and with a valuation of over $600,000.” This included eight large resorts: the Bay View Inn (formerly the Dew Drop), Birch Point Inn, Fernlund’s, Goodwill’s, Jackson’s Place, Joyce’s Landing, Osterberg’s Island, and Sody’s Place. The Birch Point Inn and Hotel Idlewilde are also often cited, especially the Idlewilde for dancing. Most had a rustic, wilderness feel that played up the picturesque images of the lake. There were also over four hundred private homes (mostly summer residences), as well as six hotels in Tower itself, most notably the luxurious Vermilion Hotel.

Minnesota’s now famous state-wide resort activity was not prominent in the U.S. until the late 1920s- early 1930s, when it developed in relationship to easier access through increased automobile usage and better, more comprehensive roads and highways. However, due to the vibrant decades-long tourism industry afforded by railroad transport to the area, prior to the coming of the automobile, Lake Vermilion was a distinctive and unusual exception and it did its best to sustain that momentum. The ongoing national publicity campaign by the D&IR to bring tourists to Lake Vermilion via the Tower Train Passenger Depot was perhaps the largest factor in this success.

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