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By P.Moraski/Tower MN

Tower, MN-What began as a simple potluck supper on a crisp autumn evening in 1965 has become one of Tower’s most enduring institutions: The Tower-Soudan Historical Society

The idea to form a historical society took root when longtime resident and retired schoolteacher Agnes Lindstrom brought a weathered leather trunk to the community hall. Inside were artifacts from Tower’s early mining days-photographs, maps, a mining payroll book, and a diary from her grandfather, Lars Lindstrom, who had emigrated from Sweden and helped dig the first shafts at the Soudan Mine.

As locals gathered around the makeshift display table, something shifted.

“People stopped just eating and started remembering,” said Lindstrom at one time. “ I realized how much history was sitting right here in this room-and how easily it could be lost.”

That night, several attendees, including retired miner Henry “Hank” Maki, proposed a follow up meeting. Within months, a group of a dozen residents has organized into what would officially become the Tower-Soudan Minnesota Historical Society.

Their first project: converting the old, unused railroad depot into a makeshift museum and headquarters.

“It was full of dust, pigeons, and holes in the roof, but it had good bones,” said Maki in a 1980 interview. “Just like Tower itself.”

Volunteers worked through the summer months patching walls, cataloging donated items, and building a collection of relics that told the story of the region-from Ojibwe heritage and fur trading routes to the rise of the iron mining in the late 1800s.

By 1975, the society played a key role in the founding of the Soudan Underground Mine State Park, now a major draw for visitors and a living monument to Tower-Soudan’s Iron mining legacy.

“Tower has always been small, but its story is big,” said Ellen Maki who at one time was the president and granddaughter of Henry Maki. “And thanks to the vision of people like Agnes, we’re still telling it.”

The Tower-Soudan Historical Society invites community and surrounding members to visit the museum, share their own family stories, and help carry on the tradition of preserving the Iron Range’s past for the future.