Bicycling to Duluth 1950

1950 Recollections: from the book Sailing to Lake Superior, 2020.

“Get a bicycle. You will not regret it, if you live.” Mark Twain

Seventy years ago the world was a different place before TV and Internet. Bustling Duluth/Superior was the second largest seaport in America and serviced by 9 railroads.

Ron Hartman and his grandchildren Torie and Corbin Peterson, 2001.
Ron was my neighbor and best friend from my childhood.

Bicycling to Duluth – I was ten years old in 1950

On a frigid blustery December morning at the head of the Great Lakes, Duluth-Superior was unseasonably snow-less, bleakly gray and dismally stark.

Superior is not a beautiful city, but a city surrounded by beauty.

Looking for a new frontier with my youthful enthusiasm spiriting me on, and a bicycle to propel me, I connected with my neighborhood pal, Ron Hartman, who delighted in adventure.

We were on a lark, it would take us where the wind blew and the fickle finger of fate steered.

Reflecting on memories inspired by stories of pioneers who first peopled this virgin country motivated my insightful prospective.

The bone chilling unrelenting wind storm known as the Siberian Express blasting out of the Canadian tundra did not dissuade our youthful enthusiasm, and we bicycled on.

While passing the stately old mansion a few blocks away from home that was the city orphanage, Ron and I thankful in our good fortune, we were free to roam.

The Superior Children’s Home, overlooked Superior’s bay on East 2^nd St. The Victorian-era mansion was built by Martin Pattison in the late 1800’s. When Martin Pattison’s widow Grace left Superior in 1920, she left her mansion with the express purpose of a children’s home. The mansion is now a museum.

Superior also had another children’s home off North 28^th street in a place known as hobo jungle. St. Joseph’s Orphan Home was completed in 1917 and operated by the Catholic Church.

Ron and I had friends and schoolmates residing in the homes who couldn’t even begin to dream of the lark we were free to pursue.

These affection starved kids became good friends, and they were easy to like but it was also easy to see that their situations were hopeless even though they tried to give such an optimistic outlook.

Our bike route continued west through Superior’s old Central Park neighborhood. This was the city’s

first up-scale neighborhood with ginger-bread adorned 1880s vintage mansions. They were constructed by cash-flush East Coast entrepreneurs whose fortunes came from depleting the area’s natural resources. The World War II cash infusion still had momentum, but it didn’t buy house paint for the old mansions. Depression era austerity mentality was a hard thing to leave behind.

Our spirits were up and the idea of biking across the harbor to distant Duluth that loomed ahead on the hills of Lake Superior’s north shore spurred us on.

Another mile across Superior’s flatland found us in the north of the city where Northern Brewery was actively producing beer, emitting steam and aromas from its tall smoke stack.

The Northern Brewing Company was another early memory of the downtown. I still remember many trips to the loading dock around the back of the brewery next to the railroad tracks with my mother. This is where a case of beer could be purchased for 85 cents. The beer was in the tall-necked returnable bottles and the beer boxes were made of wood. It was a busy place. I believe that the number one amusement in Wisconsin was drinking, and this was where the price was right and the product excellent.

Next we were in the poorest part of town and passed several government housing projects, over numerous railroad crossings on our way to Connors Point.

Leaving the city’s north end on a two lane road, which was also the main interstate highway, we meandered west around the low wetlands area of Howard’s Pocket that separated Duluth-Superior Bay by a lengthy sandbar.

In 1950 Howard’s Pocket was the home of a shipyard that five years earlier frantically produced battleships twenty-four hours a day for America’s war effort. Now they were back to maintenance of the Great Lakes freighter fleet that transported grain from the Dakotas, iron ore from Minnesota, and coal from Pennsylvania. A lock was built in 1855 allowing large freighters to pass that connected Lake Superior to all Great Lakes shipping and the recently built Erie Barge Canal in New York State.

Superior was full of contradictions and paradoxes that perplexed my young mind. At ten years of age I hadn’t perceived of what whore houses and gambling dens were all about but our seaport city was filled with them and ironically churches abounded. My dad used to say: “if you want to find a hypocrite you have to go to church.”

Next we pedaled on to Connor’s Point. A word about Connor’s Point; Connor’s Point is a sand spit barrier within the Duluth/Superior harbor at the entrance to the St. Louis River that forms the border between Wisconsin and Minnesota. At the end of this sand spit is Rice Point in Duluth, Minnesota.

Before the arrival of Europeans, Connor’s Point was a seasonal Indian settlement in a virgin pine forest on a crystal clear river teaming with an abundance of fish. The first rustic buildings were trading posts built by French voyagers.

History had nearly stood still here at this “Head of the Great Lakes” for thousands of years until 1870 when the Lake Superior & Mississippi Railroad first arrived in Duluth linking the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River at St. Paul.

The trans-continental rail from St. Paul to Washington State came next in 1893. This made Duluth-Superior a transportation link between the Atlantic and Pacific in the geographic center of the North American continent.

Gold rush mentality hyped by explosive expansion and speculation fueled a massive influx of eager European immigrants with glorious illusions.

Connor’s Point developed Detroit Pier for marine commerce. Several businesses sprung up including saw mills and a small residential neighborhood.

A few unpainted buildings still remained as a testimony to those boom times before railroads and steamships when Connor’s Point, Superior’s first settlement, was the only trading outpost at the terminus of Lake Superior on the western end of the Great Lakes. Freight docks and lumber mills would soon be built and operating to full capacity at that very spot. The Duluth-Superior Bridge Company, backed by the Great Northern Railway built a bridge connecting Connor’s Point in Wisconsin to Rice's Point in Minnesota. The completed bridge was dedicated in April of 1897.

One building still stubbornly standing on Conner’s Point in 1950 was the Grimsrud Meat Market, the first grocery store in Superior, Wisconsin.

This is where my grandfather Christ and his brother Hans went to work for their older brother Martin upon their arrival from Norway. At that time the timber baron, Weyerhaeuser, the clear-cut king of the logging industry, had recently arrived. Eventually the Grimsrud Meat Market moved to 1306 North 5th St. in Superior’s North End.

Our bicycle ride along the Duluth-Superior harbor was unsurpassed for its impressive scenery even on this bleak snow less winter day.

Ron Hartman and I continued our bicycle ride on to the 1897 era Interstate Bridge. We were each prepared to pay the 5¢ bicycle toll, though we had to walk our bikes most of the way across because of traffic.

Nowadays five cents, then known as a nickel doesn’t seem like a lot of money, but when I was a kid you could buy for a nickel any of the following: a newspaper, five U. S. postcards, three second-class postage stamps, a soft drink, a candy bar, an ice cream cone, a refillable cup of coffee, a pack of Kool-Aid, use of a pay phone, or a bowl of rice in a Chinese restaurant. I would push a hand powered lawn mower half a day for 25¢ back then.

Bicycling to Duluth in my youth was like striking off into a foreign country.

This end of Duluth at Rice's Point on Garfield Avenue was at the foot of the Interstate Bridge. Here was as hardscrabble a place as could be imagined in America. It conjured up mental images of post-war bombed out East Bloc countries. We saw tar paper shanties and ragged tattered children this freezing morning toting burlap sacks scrounging bits of coal dropped from steam locomotives along the railroad tracks so they could heat their humble shanties. These were mostly Indian kids pushed to the bottom rung of society’s social strata. A hundred years earlier these once proud people were the custodians of a pristine virgin forest and crystal clear waters teaming with nature’s abundance.

Back to our bicycle journey into Duluth’s down and out waterfront that boasted “where sail meets rail” in 1950.

The only retail business on Garfield Avenue was Goldfine’s Trading Post, a relic of the past. It was housed in an old bare bones three-story wooden warehouse building with a railroad loading dock dating from another era. Goldfine’s truly was a trading post. Farmers brought in their hay bales, live stock, or anything of value as currency to buy farm supplies and furniture.

From there we had two choices for getting into the downtown business district, continue on Garfield Avenue to Superior Street or take a short cut on Railroad Street. Either way we would enter downtown in the skid-row Bowery district. We took Railroad Street. This route directly through a huge railroad switching yard was an absolute nightmare in an automobile. On a bicycle crossing hundreds of rails at various intersecting angles among switch engine locomotives and freight cars gliding off in all directions and no defined rail crossings was a terrifying experience for ten-year old's.

A few months earlier on my way to school one morning I had a nightmare experience. My father had always admonished me to get off my bicycle and walk it across railroad tracks. On this particular day I dismounted and as I was halfway across a train whistle blasted. I looked up and panicked when I saw a steam locomotive bearing down on me. I fumbled the bicycle, and a pedal got stuck between the tracks. The engineer frantically blasted his whistle. It was too late to halt the rapidly rolling train. I pulled and jerked the bike, and at the last second I stepped clear just in time to see that locomotive rumbling by while the engineer shook his fist at me in frustration. I am sure that the engineer shared the same recurring nightmare with me.

Those massive steam locomotives, in the eye of a ten year old, are intimidating in the extreme. The adrenaline rushing, heart pounding incident removed all thoughts of the arctic cold temperatures.

Duluth was not a bicycle friendly place, as we soon found out. Gigantic electric powered buses connected to overhead cables that sparked and snapped along seemed to play bumper tag with the motorists. Everybody was in a hurry looking for nearly non-existent parking places.

We found a lunch spot at Joe Huey’s Chinese restaurant on Lake Avenue in the heart of the downtown business district. Our pocket change was limited, but 5¢ would buy a large bowl of rice, and we could help ourselves to all the soy sauce we could tolerate. It was salted to kill, but we were hungry kids.

Window shopping and cruising the streets of Duluth on that winter day on our bicycles lost much of its appeal with the tundra temperatures and wind blasting. On warmer days our bicycle adventure trip to Duluth would be repeated many times in the coming years.

When Ron and I decided to return to Superior, a sickening realization came over us when we discovered that we didn’t have enough money for our return bridge toll.

We didn’t have the courage to attempt walking our bicycles across the frozen bay. It could be a very dangerous endeavor because near the bridge center span the river current flowed swiftly and thin ice is unforgiving.

Ron had an idea, and we didn’t have many options at this point. We stood at the bridge approach and Ron said that we could walk our bicycles up the narrow sidewalk in the wrong direction to the middle of the bridge and cross over to the other side at a service area in the center, avoiding the toll taker and then continue in the correct direction off the bridge. We could stand around and freeze to death or take our chances on the questionable ice. It was time for action; away we went, safely crossing the bridge to Connor’s Point.

Elvina Martinsen, a Norwegian immigrant living in the Duluth-Superior area in 1889 described taking a horse drawn trolley from Superior to Duluth and crossing the bay by ferryboat. The fare was ten cents.

Prior to 1897, ferryboats connected the two cities. The ferryboats did not run in winter, but as soon as the bay froze over people crossed on the ice. *

What a treasure trove of wonderful memories I have of Ron Hartman, my best friend from my childhood.

These everlasting recollections are priceless...thank you Ron!

*Note: That bay ice was harvested by sawing in large blocks, stored with wood shavings as insulation that kept it through the summer months and was used to cool perishable foods. Residential “ice boxes”, using this ice were still in use in Superior when I was a child until 1950.

Photo of Ron Hartman courtesy to his daughter Kelly Peterson.