The history of Gary-New Duluth, Minnesota

Gary and New Duluth were founded separately, about twenty years apart, and both by outside capital betting on industry at the head of the lakes.

New Duluth came first. In 1888 a Chicago firm began buying land along the St. Louis River shore, promoting the site for business and factory development under the name New Duluth. The bet was that heavy industry would concentrate here rather than at the harbor eleven miles northeast. It half worked. The development never became the independent industrial city its promoters imagined, and by 1895 it had been incorporated into Duluth, in the same round of annexations that took in Fond du Lac.

Gary came in the following generation and came from steel. In 1907 Elbert Henry Gary, founding chairman of the United States Steel Corporation, announced that a major steel plant would be built in the area. The community that grew to house the workforce took his name. He was also the namesake of Gary, Indiana, which makes this small Duluth neighborhood a distant namesake cousin of a much larger industrial city.

The plant was the Duluth Works, built on the river between here and Morgan Park, with production beginning in 1913. It defined this end of the city for six decades. US Steel also built Morgan Park next door as a planned company town, and the relationship between the two places is the important part of the story. Morgan Park was built as a segregated company town, and much of the workforce that did not qualify for its company housing lived here instead, under company rules that reflected the era. That describes the past, not who lives in these neighborhoods today.

The Duluth Works employed more than 2,500 people on a continuous basis through its operating years. It closed in 1972. The effect on the surrounding neighborhoods was severe and long-lasting, in population as well as employment, and the reputation this end of the city carries in Duluth was formed during the decades of decline that followed rather than by its current condition.

The longer history beneath all of this belongs to the Ojibwe. This stretch of the St. Louis River corridor is Ojibwe homeland, and the river was the route between Lake Superior and the interior long before either townsite was platted. The corridor trail through the neighborhood carries the name Waabizheshikana, the Marten Trail, in recognition of that.

What the neighborhood has done since is quieter and more recent: a resident-led effort, working with the City and private partners, to rebuild the community park into a functioning recreation center for a community of more than 3,000 people.

History next door

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