Ely to dedicate memorial honoring 218 Iron Range miners
Ely dedicated a memorial at Pioneer Mine for 218 miners, led by John E. Ogren, whose names, ages and mine sites now sit on two granite stones.
Ely chose to make the human cost of Iron Range mining visible at the Pioneer Mine headframe site, where a new memorial was dedicated for 218 men who died in the region’s iron ore mines from 1889 to 1966. The granite markers put names, ages and mine locations into a permanent public record, turning scattered losses into one place of remembrance.
The project reached back to the kind of danger that defined the industry. A 1914 cave-in at Sibley Mine trapped six men when massive timbers supporting the main shaft gave way, a reminder that mining built the Northland economy at a brutal cost. The new memorial gave Ely and St. Louis County a public way to reckon with that history, not as abstraction, but as the lives of local workers and families.
The first name on the memorial is John E. Ogren, a 28-year-old Swedish immigrant who died Jan. 31, 1889, in the Chandler Mine. His name anchors a list that spans the Pioneer Mine era through the last years of underground iron mining in Ely, where Pioneer closed in 1967 as the city’s final underground ore mine.
Nick Wognum, president of the Ely Arts and Heritage Center, said the memorial was more than 20 years in the making. Volunteers and researcher Michele Lammi gathered newspaper clippings and screenshots documenting the deaths, then helped raise more than $50,000 to finish the project. The Ely city council approved the memorial in 2011, the city contributed $15,000, and the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board added a $15,000 grant.
The memorial now sits within a wider historic site. Pioneer Mine buildings and the A Headframe were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, and the city-owned campus remains a central piece of Ely’s heritage landscape. Wognum said the project team hopes to add two miner statues in the future, one representing an 1800s miner with a candle on his helmet and another from the era when Pioneer closed in 1967.
For Ely, the dedication did more than mark a date on the calendar. It gave the Iron Range a durable place to see the names behind its ore, and to understand that the region’s prosperity was built by men whose losses were too long left in fragments.
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