Local lore in Proctor, Minnesota

• The town is named after a man who made fun of Duluth. J. Proctor Knott's speech of January 27, 1871 ridiculing the idea of a railroad to Duluth killed the bill and made him famous, and the rail town on the hill incorporated as Proctorknott in 1894 anyway. It was shortened to Proctor in 1904.
• Proctor Hill is a railroad term before it is a geographic one. The line drops about 600 feet from the yard to the ore docks on a maximum 2.2% grade, which favored loaded trains going down and made empties coming back up the hard part.
• In 1941 the DM&IR moved more than 37 million tons of ore, and it was sorted here. For a few years in the 1940s the flat ground above Duluth held the largest and most productive ore-sorting yard on earth.
• The high school teams are the Rails. The summer festival is the Hoghead Festival, hoghead being old railroad slang for a locomotive engineer. The town has never pretended to be about anything else.
• Bayview Heights has a Duluth address, a Duluth zip code, and a Proctor school assignment, which is why residents there tend to say they are "kind of Proctor" and leave it at that.
• The Munger Trail starts in Proctor and runs 63 paved miles to Hinckley on the old Northern Pacific grade. The town that was built to move ore by rail now sits at the head of one of Minnesota's longest bike trails, on a railbed.

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