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Chapter five describes how historical memory became a battleground on the postwar Iron Range. Amid conflict over the future direction of the Iron Range's economy, the region turned to heritage tourism. The centerpiece of heritage tourism on the Iron Range was a museum and entertainment complex known as Ironworld. Ironworld was a microcosm of the larger problems of historical memory on the Iron Range and in other declining industrial regions, where residents were torn between a desire to honor the industrial past and the challenge of moving into a post-industrial future.

Chapter two continues taconite's story into the mid-1960s when Minnesota added a taconite amendment to the state constitution. The amendment prevented taconite taxes from rising disproportionately to other business taxes. The amendment dispute cleaved Minnesota's DFL Party throughout the first half of the 1960s. Eventually, the forces in favor of the amendment won, but it set the stage for future arguments against corporate taxation that continue today. Also woven throughout this chapter are examples of decline on the Iron Range during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Chapter three describes the major pollution lawsuit that affected the mining region, Reserve Mining Company v. USA. I argue that the trial must be understood within the context of taconite's development as a technological fix for decline on the Iron Range. Taconite's technological and engineering feats were only possible because they shifted costs onto the environment. When those costs could no longer be ignored—as when spreading taconite tailings began discoloring Lake Superior—people reassessed industrial development. For many miners, the case was also their first glimpse of the new environmental movement that would challenge their livelihood.

The conclusion offers a brief overview of the Iron Range in the years since 2000. The region's mines are now tied to a volatile global commodities market and uncertainty is perhaps the only reasonable prediction for the region's future. New forms of mining, including copper-nickel deposits, have the potential to create lucrative new mining ventures but also may lead to more extensive environmental harm. New mining has also resurrected old debates about the balance between mining jobs, the north woods environment, and the region's industrial culture.

Chapter four describes the Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation Board and economic development policy on the Iron Range. The IRRRB was formed in the 1940s to diversify the Iron Range's economy and ensure that tax money from mining was spent on long-term investments. Yet the IRRRB was enmeshed in controversy from its birth. In the late 1950s and 1960s it became a model for a short-lived national agency designed to support declining regions: the Area Redevelopment Administration (ARA). This brief federal program was soon abandoned. The IRRRB has also struggled to develop new industries on the Iron Range, often coming under fire for well-publicized boondoggles.

Chapter one describes how taconite technology was offered as a painless fix for the declining region in the mid-twentieth century. Focusing on engineer Edward W. Davis, known as “Mr. Taconite,” this chapter describes the decades of work required to perfect low-grade taconite ore milling and shift the iron ore industry from older hematite mines to new taconite mines, which required work in politics and marketing as well as engineering.