A century later, U.S. Steel’s west Duluth mill

Zenith City Online commemorates the 107th anniversary of U.S. Steel’s 1907  announcement that it would build a steel mill in West Duluth. It would be 1915 before U.S. Steel would actually produce steel, and that mill closed in 1987, but this occurrence dramatically shaped history for Duluth and northeastern Minnesota; keeping more of the labor and economic growth here than otherwise possible.

U.S. Steel never really wanted to build a steel mill here, but agreed to do so in exchange for lower taxes on iron ore production. Duluth would have been a very different city without this mill; smaller, less populous and less prosperous.