After 41 Years, Nashwauk's Old Butler Taconite Ground Is Mining Iron Again

First, the ore itself

Taconite is a hard, low-grade rock. At best, only 32.5 percent of it is iron, compared with closer to 60 percent in the natural ores miners first dug on the Mesabi, according to MNopedia. It became worth mining only after University of Minnesota researcher E.W. Davis worked out how to grind it and pull the iron free with magnets. Reserve Mining's first taconite shipments followed in the mid-1950s. Minnesota voters approved a taconite tax amendment in 1964, which MNopedia credits with making the industry viable.

Then Butler, 1967 to 1985

Butler Taconite, run by M.A. Hanna, belonged to that generation. When it shut on June 28, 1985, the Mesabi Tribune called it an 18-year-old plant and counted about 450 Hanna layoffs across Butler and the National Steel Pellet Plant near Keewatin. The ore was still in the ground. The market was not there. "It just ravaged the Range," Nashwauk Mayor Greg Heyblom told MPR, remembering the era when every taconite plant up there was shut.

Next, the long stall

Essar, an industrial group based in India, eventually took on a new plant on the old Butler footprint. It did not go smoothly. Essar's Minnesota company went through bankruptcy in 2016 owing the state about $66 million, according to MPR reporting republished by the Duluth News Tribune in December 2024. The project came back under the Mesabi Metallics name. MPR's 2026 story says the company has since repaid $50 million to Minnesota and paid another $47 million in taxes, leases and rent.

The mood turned before the machinery did. By late 2024 the Duluth News Tribune, carrying MPR's reporting, described a standing-room-only meeting at the Nashwauk town hall where then-Mayor Cal Saari declared an Appreciation Day for Mesabi Metallics and handed the company a key to the city. "I'm telling you, in Itasca County, happy days are here again," he said. A small town giving a key to a company that had once owed the state millions is either forgiveness or optimism. I suspect it was both.

By September 2026 the numbers had caught up with the mood. MPR counted about 1,500 construction workers on site, 350 planned full-time jobs with more than 200 already hired, and an estimated 23-year life for the pit, before any expansion.

Once more, with colored dust

On September 17, 2026, crews detonated more than a million pounds of explosives, and the plumes rose red, white and blue. KAXE counted more than 100 people there. The Export-Import Bank, which lent $770 million, called it the first iron ore project of its kind to open in America in over 50 years. Eleven days later the company's name was attached to a planned $15 billion Iowa steel mill, which our main explainer covers.

What moved me most in the coverage was not the money. It was MPR's quote from Al Guddeck, 80, who worked at Butler for two decades. The first thing his grandmother did, he recalled, was go out and wipe the ore off the clothesline. "She never complained about it because Grandpa was working in the mines, so it was money," he said.

We cannot promise this chapter ends better than the last one; taconite has broken plenty of promises on the Range. But for once the ground at Nashwauk has an argument on its side: the ore Anderson's crews left behind in 1985 is being dug, and the old superintendent got to see it.