Local lore in Silver Bay, Minnesota

• The whole town was built at once. Streets, utilities, sidewalks, landscaping, and houses to a handful of plans, all installed before people moved in, paid for by the mining company.
• Houses cost under $50 a month with no down payment. That was the offer Reserve Mining made to get a workforce to move to an empty shoreline in the 1950s.
• It was designed for 10,000 and peaked at about 3,900. Silver Bay has never been as full as it was drawn to be, and today it holds roughly 1,790.
• Black Beach is black because of taconite tailings dumped offshore in the 1960s. The town turned it into a park and a campground rather than apologising for it.
• The first post office was a house. One of the first residences finished in the project was pressed into service before anything civic had been built.
• Palisade Head is four miles away. A rhyolite cliff standing several hundred feet straight out of Lake Superior, and one of the few places in Minnesota where people rock climb over open water.

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