Out-of-town small town paper profiles a Range small town landmark

Many Iron Rangers know that Hibbing, positioned in the heart of the Mesabi Range, is the birthplace of the Greyhound Bus Company and home to the Greyhound Bus Museum, an interesting destination that is both informative and included on most lists of government pork projects released by public watchdog groups each year. Hey, what’s an economically stagnant area with a senior Congressman supposed to do? Starve? What good is allocating the money if you can’t enjoy spending it?

Anyway, we made the Noblesville (Indiana) Daily Times after Elizabeth Granger, a travel writer, visited Hibbing last year. In all seriousness, the story of how Greyhound started here is interesting and part of the unique, some would say bizarre cultural factors that make the Range what it is today.

Ticket to ride Greyhound

HIBBING, Minn. – It was 1914, and Andrew Anderson and Carl Wickman were having no luck selling their Hupmobile to the iron ore miners on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

“Everybody wanted a demonstration ride, but nobody wanted to buy,” said Gene Nicolelli, director of the Greyhound Bus Museum in Hibbing.

And then part of Hibbing moved. Literally. The iron ore mines were expanding; high-grade ore was under the town, and nature’s bounty took precedence over man’s comfort. Close to 200 buildings, most of them two-story houses, were moved from North Hibbing to Alice, a location 2 miles to the south.

Eventually all of Hibbing would move, but for a while there were North Hibbing and South Hibbing. The mine and some homes, businesses and churches were still in North Hibbing while other houses were already in Alice.

So Anderson and Wickman hung a sign from the Hupmobile, offering rides. One-way, 15 cents. Round-trip, a quarter.

The idea was met with instant success.

Soon there were more routes with more cars. The Hupmobile owners took on more partners. Mechanics revamped vehicles to carry more passengers.

Nicolelli was impressed with the story of Swedish immigrants Anderson and Wickman.

“They parlayed something from a 2-mile route to the biggest bus company in the free world, privately owned,” Nicolelli said. “It’s amazing what they did. That’s what got me interested in this. I couldn’t believe it. It was timing – being in the right place at the right time – but the most important part was that they had the guts to take chances. They just kept expanding and expanding and taking on more partners.”

But then one partner would break away and start his own bus company in one area, another partner in another area. Soon there were many separate bus companies that could get travelers to distant places – but with the inconvenience of having to buy separate tickets from each bus company for each leg of the trip. So one company would buy out another, and another … ultimately making Greyhound a nationwide carrier. Nicolelli himself was never with Greyhound.

“I was a grocery man when I got interested in this,” he said.

It was more than 30 years ago when Hibbing’s abandoned bus depot was converted into a grocery store, and he found a plaque honoring the town as the birthplace of the bus industry. He thought it would be nice to rededicate it.

He went to the library to research the bus history and found old articles from Fortune magazine, Reader’s Digest and Saturday Evening Post.

“It just fascinated me what these guys did,” he said.

So Nicolelli went to then-governor Rudy Perpich.

“I convinced him that this is a story that should be told. It’s part of Americana. Greyhound did on rubber what the railroad did on steel, connecting the country together.”

In 1989, the Greyhound Bus Museum opened in a small corner of the Hibbing Municipal Building. In 1999, it moved to its present location on Greyhound Boulevard, on the way to North Hibbing. Here are 13 buses in mint condition, including the 1914 Hupmobile that started it all. A video, “Go Greyhound,” plays in a room resembling the inside of a bus; viewers watch from actual bus seats. Display cases are filled with memorabilia ranging from old photos and uniforms to bus parts and toys. There’s even a size 28 Greyhound driver’s hat worn by Mickey Mouse at Disney World.

Images of greyhounds – authentic logos as well as more casual drawings – are everywhere.

And often, there’s Nicolelli, shaking a visitor’s hand, answering a question, sharing an anecdote – still fascinated by the story of the local guys who gave birth to the country’s bus industry.

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