by Davis Helberg

Either, Ore
To Taconite or Taconot, There Is No Question

When LTV closed its taconite processing plant in Hoyt Lakes in 2000, then-Governor Jesse Ventura pledged to pull out all stops in finding another major user for the facility.

Toward that end, Ventura used one of his appearances on “The Tonight Show” with Jay Leno. There he was, our governor, the former Navy Seal/pro rassler/radio shock jock/movie actor, sitting there with all his shaved head/eye-twinkling/ larger-than-life charisma, displaying a handful of iron ore pellets to Leno and millions of late-night TV viewers across the nation.

Paraphrasing, it went something like this:

Leno: What have you got there, Governor?

Ventura: Taconite pellets. They made ’em at a plant in Minnesota, but that plant has shut down. There’s a great opportunity for someone to come up there and operate that plant because there’s a great work force up there and a great facility, and I know someone could come up there and make a lot of money and put a lot of people back to work and we’ll help ’em out in every way we can.

Leno: Hmmm. Great. But what is, um, taconite? What did you call those things?

Ventura: Taconite. They’re taconite pellets. You know, taconite pellets.

Leno: What are they used for?

Ventura: Well, you know, you, um, you make things out of them. Steel and stuff.

Taconite iron ore pellets, should you be asked on “The Tonight Show,” are used to make steel. Photo by Randy Bauer

My dentist appreciates such golden moments because he knows I’ll be in the next day with another chipped tooth.

I thought I wouldn’t get so worked up about such relatively trivial matters when I retired from the Duluth Seaway Port Authority five years ago. But, alas, I now have more time to grind my molars.

If the governor had said he was holding iron ore pellets, virtually everyone watching the show - and Leno - would have made the connection between iron ore and steelmaking.

We created this confusion ourselves …

The iron ore discovered in northeastern Minnesota in the 1880s was mainly hematite, a rock with naturally high iron content that could be mined and loaded directly into railroad cars and, eventually, transferred to lake vessels for shipment to steel mills in the lower Great Lakes. But steelmaking for military production in World Wars I and II and Korea, combined with the mid-century economic boom, consumed such phenomenal volumes that by the mid-1950s, natural ore reserves were being exhausted.

Meanwhile, anticipating the decline, metallurgical engineers and scientists had developed technology to convert taconite - an abundant rock with low iron content - into pellets with uniformly high iron content. The first commercial taconite-processing plant was built at Silver Bay and the first shipment of pellets headed down the lakes in 1956. A year later came the first shipment out of Taconite Harbor with pellets from Hoyt Lakes.

In shorthand version, the taconite rock is mined, crushed into powder and mixed with water; then the iron is magnetically separated, mixed with a binder (bentonite clay), rolled into marble-like shapes and, finally, baked to achieve hardness for handling and transportation. It becomes an iron ore pellet.

To differentiate between natural iron ore and the new iron ore pellets, nearly everyone called the new cargo “taconite pellets.” Some just said “taconite.”

As the years passed, the volume of natural ore shipments steadily dwindled and by the 1980s, most of the so-called red-ore trade ended. When the conversion to pellets was for all purposes complete, we no longer needed to make the distinction between iron ore and taconite. We should have reverted to the universal usage of iron ore. It might be in pellet form, but it’s still iron ore.

But we didn’t. Old habits die hard. And the commonly used term around here became, and continues to be, simply, “taconite.”

Yet the American Iron & Steel Institute, the Lake Carriers’ Association, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and virtually everyone else who publishes cargo statistics calls the product … iron ore.

On the premise that understanding and appreciation of the shipping industry begins with basic education, I have been waging a little crusade for years to try to get the local news media and others to use the right names. This iron ore thing is near the top of my list. Some get it, some don’t.

It doesn’t help that most of the processing plants in northeastern Minnesota have taconite built into their names. And while the Iron Mining Association of Minnesota’s motto is “Working to produce the ore, that makes the steel, that builds America,” its website is www.taconite.org.

Maybe we keep saying taconite just to confuse the tourists.

Visit Duluth estimates that the Twin Ports annually attract about 3 million visitors. One can only imagine their expressions when they’re at the Duluth Ship Canal and hear that we ship some 20 million tons a year of … taconite.

“Say what? Taco-what? I wasn’t looking for a Mexican restaurant. I was asking what’s in that boat.”

If we call iron ore by its right name, we might save a future governor from being embarrassed on national TV and I could save a lot on dental bills.

This issue’s Journal writer: Fifty summers ago, 17-year-old Davis Helberg climbed aboard a Great Lakes steamboat and signed on as a deckhand. That autumn, the vessel called at the new port of Silver Bay to load iron ore pellets. Helberg said he quickly learned that pellets were (A) safety hazards if left on deck, (B) excellent slingshot ammunition and (C) disruptive to crew harmony if placed under bed sheets. Now, as the retired Duluth port director, he says Lesson (B) is occasionally employed in daily combat with the red squirrels that raid his bird feeders.