Local lore in Two Harbors, Minnesota

• The name is plural because the town was two towns. Agate Bay and Burlington were separate settlements until they merged in 1907, and the Sonju Trail is essentially a walk from one former town to the other.
• Iron has shipped from Agate Bay since 1884, on what were Lake Superior's first ore docks and, for a while, the largest in the world. The Two Harbors Light Station went up in 1892 to guide those boats in and has been lit ever since, making it the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the North Shore. You can watch a carrier load from a public park, and you can rent a room in the keeper's house.
• Betty's Pies started as a fish shack her father built in 1957. She added pies in 1958. Nearly seventy years later it is the reason a nontrivial number of Minnesotans drive up Highway 61 in the first place.
• Castle Danger Brewery is named for a stretch of shoreline northeast of town whose own name nobody can fully explain, which is the most North Shore fact available.
• Every November 10 the Split Rock beacon is lit for the twenty-nine men lost on the Edmund Fitzgerald in 1975. People drive from across the state and stand in the cold to watch it.
• The Superior Hiking Trail, one of the best long-distance footpaths in the country, is run out of a small office on 1st Avenue in Two Harbors.

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