MOVING A TOWN

Otago Witness, Issue 3594, 30 January 1923, Page 48

MOVING A TOWN

The town of Hibbing has settled down on its new site in the great Mesabi iron region of Minnesota. It is estimated to have cost between 15,000,000 and 18,000,000 dollars to move this town of 15,000 inhabitants off the rich iron ore bed it had grown upon—a moving bill of something like 1000 dollars per head of population. Hibbing now stands two miles distant from the 40 million tons of ore it had locked up. v--.-. The story of the moving of Hibbing is part of the epic of steel. The town her ing in the way, the Oliver Mining Company, a subsidiary of the United States Steed Corporation, moved it, and in the moving spent millions so lavishly that Hibbing is now described in the Christian Science Monthly as resembling, in the midst of the iron range, a jewel dropped on a slag heap. It has a 3,000,000-dollar ihgh school fitted with marble and bronze. It has a 500,000-dollar hotel, expensive clubs, department stores, public buildings—a model city of rea.l architectural pretensions that may be deserted in 30 years or so. When the iron is mined there will be no more reason for Hibbing. Two years ago the Oliver Company, having pretty well exhausted the ore in adjoining sections, drilled its town site property, and found an immense body of ore lying under a surface so thin that mining would be quite inexpensive. As its lease was for a 50-year term and time was passing, the company decided to remove the town —bag, building, and baggage—to a spot two miles south where there was no ore. Although the company held mining rights and could have evicted all residents on the tract, it chose to move everybody, replace their .homes or places of business intact, to build new on their own plans, if so desired, and to take payment in longterm contracts at low interest rates, to build streets, place, sewers, lay sidewalks, and generally improve the new location. The town on its own part put in schools and other public buildings. There are other schools almost as costly as the high school. There is a light, heat, and power plant representing over- 1,000,000 dollars, which supplies heat, water, and electric current for all purposes at lees than cost; and there are innumerable other conveniences for living. The town could afford it, as more than 96 per cent, of its tax receipts were from the various mining companies, outside corporations that could not move their property away in time to escape taxes. As to the moving, it was comparatively easy to lay out everything harmoniously and on a proper scale, and it was simple to save money by doing the work by wholesale. The moving of buildings was done by putting very heavy sets of small wheels under each corner of the building and hitching a tractor to them. Thus the structure would travel across the two miles from, the old town to the new in a day. The centre of the new town is composed of new buildings, of steel and atone, brick and terra-cotta, most of them built for tbs occupants by the Oliver Company on the basis of payment on long time, with low interest on deferred charges.