received on that day a telegram from President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

Hibbing

The Town of Stuntz, which comprises five and a half townships, including also that area which is the Village of Hibbing, lies between Balkan and the western edge of the county. It did not receive local government until 1894, but its name goes back to the surveyor who worked in this region in the 1850s. The beginning of those developments which made the Town of Stuntz one of the most important in St. Louis County and which made one of its villages, that of Hibbing, the richest village in the world, go back to the period of the 1880s and early 1890s when ore was discovered. Hibbing, in fact, was organized in 1893, a year earlier than the Town of Stuntz itself.

The forest wealth of St. Louis County had been the original attraction in Northern Minnesota. A law of 1854, modified in 1889, made it possible for white persons to buy these lands at a minimum of $1.25 per acre, and agreements were frequently reached between interested prospective buyers to get the areas they wanted at that minimum, without going through the formalities of auctions and bidding for the land. It was a good investment if held until forestry operations spread into the area, for then the land could be sold for $50 per acre. After the timber was cut the land could once more be had for practically nothing, for the lumbermen were not interested in possible mineral riches. Indeed, there is the story of a land auction held in Duluth in 1882, where a young man bid in a large tract of forest at a low price for his employer, and who made his personal investment in the form of a nominal $20 to his employer in return for any mineral wealth which might be discovered on the land in question. Later, 70,000,000 tons of iron ore were indeed located on that property. In another instance, A. W. Wright and C. H. Davis purchased a 6,000 acre forest tract in one of the earliest auctions and built a small railroad from Swan River to their land, where they began forestry operations. Later they offered the Weyerhauser Company that land plus its standing timber for $1,500,000, but the company decided to buy the timber for $1,300,000 and to leave the ownership of the land with Wright and Davis. Once the timber was cut, the partners offered their land for sale at $3 per acre, but there were no takers. A few years later two mines, the Mahoning and then the Stevenson, were opened on their land,

505