Transcripts

SPEAKER: Later this morning, Crow Wing County is celebrating the grand opening of a unique park. The Milford Mine Memorial Park honors the 41 miners who were killed nearly a century ago in Minnesota's worst-ever mining disaster. It's also a reminder of the rich mining history of the Cuyuna Iron Range just east of Brainerd, where mining ended in the 1970s. Reporter Dan Kraker has our story.

DAN KRAKER: It was 3:45 in the afternoon, February 5, 1924, just 15 minutes before the end of the day shift, when a mining shaft, about 170 underground, collapsed, and mud and water from the swamp above gushed in.

JOAN STEFANO: There was a man, name of Frank Hrvatin, he was only 14 years old. He felt wind underneath-- and there was no wind in underground. There was none.

DAN KRAKER: This is 82-year-old Joan Stefano. She's a member of the Cuyuna Country Heritage Preservation Society.

JOAN STEFANO: Well, then he turned around. All of a sudden, he saw this big wave of water coming down. He said, men run for your lives.

DAN KRAKER: The men, 48 of them, frantically climbed a series of ladders to try to escape. 15 minutes later, the mine was totally submerged. Only seven miners survived. Stefano's father knew all of them. He worked at the Milford Mine, but he quit a month before the disaster. Jake Ravnik was six and a half years old, and he lived right next to the mine in a tarpaper shack the mining company built for his dad and other workers. Ravnik is 100 now, but the site of the entrance to the mine when he walked back from school that day is still etched in his memory.

JAKE RAVNIK: When we got there, the water was already there. And it was just boiling.

DAN KRAKER: His father had just bought a new lamp for his helmet that morning. When the flooding started underground, the wind blew out other miner's lights so they couldn't see, but Ravnik stayed lit, and he escaped. It took nine months before the water and mud was pumped out, and the bodies were recovered.

JAKE RAVNIK: My dad went down afterwards to start getting them out, and he found these two guys close to him, and they were holding hands. Goodbye, you know. And they were pinned right to the wall.

DAN KRAKER: Those are just some of the stories preserved by the New Milford Mine Memorial Park located at the old mine site about four miles north of the town of Crosby. 10 years in the making, it includes the old mine shaft and the foundations of the company town that built up around the mine. It also features a 450-foot boardwalk over Milford Lake which filled in after the mine closed. Etched in the boards are the names of the miners who died and those who survived.

ANNE HANSEN: This is my grandfather right here.

DAN KRAKER: Ann Hansen points to the name Nels Ritari, a Finnish immigrant who died in the collapse. Her father was two years old at the time.

ANNE HANSEN: It's just a symbol of what our family has been through. I'm just pleased that it's here.

DAN KRAKER: The park cost more than $800,000 to build. State grants paid for more than half, Crow Wing County covered the rest. Bryan Pike is the county's natural resource manager.

BRYAN PIKE: It's peaceful, quiet, serene, and it gives people that sense of knowing the history of the site and the history of the Cuyuna Iron Range.

DAN KRAKER: The Cuyuna Range is much smaller than the Mesabi Range to the north, where six huge open pit iron ore mines still operate. But the ore on the Cuyuna Range was prized because it had manganese in it, which made stronger steel. So during World Wars I and II, mines were frantically dug in the Cuyuna Range with names like Morocco, Sagamore, and Portsmouth.

But most of these mines were underground, and the work was brutally hard and dangerous. State investigators eventually declared the disaster at the Milford Mine an act of God. But many mine workers were afraid to testify for fear of losing their jobs. The Milford Mine eventually reopened, and Joan Stefano says her father went back to work underground.

JOAN STEFANO: I'm amazed that he went down again. He was not a fearful man.

DAN KRAKER: All told, Pete Stefano put 53 years in the mines, starting the day after he arrived from Italy when he was 14. Stefano says she feels close to him at the new park.

JOAN STEFANO: When I go out there, I know my father's footprints are all over there. And so when I'm walkingg it, it's like sacred ground for me.

DAN KRAKER: She says she's proud to be the daughter of an iron ore miner and proud a piece of that history is being preserved at the Milford Mine Memorial Park. Dan Kraker, Minnesota Public Radio News, Crosby.