Local lore in Esko, Minnesota

• Esko is named after a store. Alex Esko opened a shop at the Thomson Road corner in 1919, people called it Esko's Corner, and a hundred years later that is the name of the community, the school district, and the pizza place.
• The high school is named Lincoln because of a school built in 1920, and Esko's Lincoln High School still uses the name even though the original building's era is long gone.
• Saunas here are as unremarkable as garages. The tradition came with the township's first homesteading families and simply stayed, and the historical society's photograph collection is full of the one-room rural schools those same families organized across the section lines.
• The 1918 Cloquet Fire came through this country and is the reason so little of pre-1920 Esko survives. Ask an older resident and they will still be able to tell you which farms burned.
• The Jay Cooke swinging bridge, six miles from Esko, has been destroyed and rebuilt more than once, most recently after the June 2012 flood tore it out. The river gets a vote.
• There is no grocery store, no bank branch, no pharmacy, and no bar in Esko. There is a school district with 1,287 students. That ratio is the whole community in one sentence.

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