Elcor

Overview

A mining location the company took back

Elcor was a mining location, the Iron Range name for a town a company built beside its mine. The Minnesota Iron Company opened the Elba mine in 1897 between today's Gilbert and McKinley, and laid out a grid of company houses on streets that all began with M: Malta, Manilla, Mariposa, Maritana, Mauna Loa. The Corsica mine followed in 1901, and Pickands Mather and Company ran both from then on. When a post office opened in 1920 the name Elba was already taken in southeastern Minnesota, so the town joined the two mine names and became Elcor.

Around 1920 nearly 1,000 people lived there, most of them immigrants: Croatians, Slovenians, Finns, Italians, Germans, Scandinavians and English, many of them from Cornwall. The town had more than 100 houses, two churches, a school, a store, a band, a fire department and a hockey team sponsored by the Mercantile. People could own their houses, but the land under them stayed the company's.

That decided Elcor's end. The Elba was mined out in 1926, and when the Corsica pit shut down in 1954 Pickands Mather ordered the families to leave. They could buy their houses cheaply if they moved them, and most were hauled to Gilbert or McKinley. By 1956 the town was empty. The company dumped ore on the roads in, the Corsica smokestack came down in 1976, and from 1993 the waste rock of what is now the Minorca mine was piled over the townsite.

Timeline

Elba mine to Minorca mine

1. Nov 1890The Merritt brothers find iron ore near Mountain Iron and start the rush to the Mesabi Range.
2. 1897The Minnesota Iron Company opens the underground Elba mine and plats a company town, first called Elba, under its president Don H. Bacon. Every street gets a name beginning with M.
3. 1898The Elba mine ships its first ore.
4. 1901The Corsica mine ships its first ore. After U.S. Steel forms, Pickands Mather and Company takes over both mines. Cornish miners build the Corsica's 200-foot smokestack.
5. c. 1916Power lines arrive and water is piped in from Gilbert. Before that, families carried water home from a town pump fed from the mine twice a day, and later from a water tower.
6. 1920The Finnish Temperance Hall becomes the Elcor Mercantile and a post office. Because southeastern Minnesota already has an Elba, the town takes the name Elcor, from Elba and Corsica.
7. c. 1920Elcor peaks at nearly 1,000 people, with more than 100 houses, two churches, a school, a railroad station and its own patrolman. Company cottages rent for $7.50 a month.
8. 1926The Elba mine closes, mined out.
9. 1929–1940The Corsica, by then an open pit, closes in the Depression and reopens with World War II.
10. 1954The Corsica pit shuts down. Workers are told the shutdown is temporary.
11. 1955Pickands Mather orders the residents off its land. Families may buy their houses cheaply if they move them; most go about two miles west to Gilbert, others to McKinley.
12. 1956The last buildings are gone. Foundations, sidewalks and a fire hydrant are left.
13. 1976The Corsica smokestack, the last of its kind on the range, is brought down on the third try with nearly 100 pounds of dynamite.
14. 1993Inland Steel begins stripping overburden near the townsite for the Laurentian mine and stockpiles it over Elcor.
15. 2006–2020The pit becomes the Laurentian pit of ArcelorMittal's Minorca mine. Cleveland-Cliffs buys ArcelorMittal's U.S. operations in 2020.
16. May 2025Cleveland-Cliffs idles the Minorca mine. As of April 2026 it had announced no restart.

What's left

Under the stockpile

For years after 1956 the townsite was a ruin you could see from the old section of Highway 135: foundations, sidewalks, rusting stoves, a fire hydrant on a street corner and a toilet bowl still bolted to a concrete floor. The photos on this page, taken between 1978 and 1999, show the paved streets going back to brush. Since 1993 that ground has been under the Minorca mine's overburden. The aerial view below shows terraced stockpiles and haul roads where the street grid was. We found no report of anything of the town still visible.

The 1951 USGS sheet in the historic maps below shows Elcor at its last: a street grid with buildings on it, the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range tracks curving past, and the Corsica mine and its dumps to the northeast. The 1964 sheet still labels Elcor between Gilbert and McKinley, eight years after the last family left. The 1994 sheet, printed the year after stockpiling began, still puts the name beside a small street grid.

• Nothing reported above ground
• Townsite under mine overburden since 1993

Historic maps

Elcor on USGS maps, 1951–1994

Crops from the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection, centered on the townsite. Each sheet shows what surveyors mapped that year; compare them with today's topo and aerial on this page.

19511:24,00019641:250,00019941:100,000

Map & directions

Getting there

There is no public way onto the site that we know of. Both routes end on Main Street in McKinley, about 0.8 mile east-northeast of the townsite point, which is on mine land. Virginia, the closest city, is about 20 minutes away, and Duluth about an hour and a half.

Base map: USGS The National Map (public domain). Routes: OSRM on © OpenStreetMap contributors data (ODbL), computed October 2026. Times assume dry roads.

Photos

Elcor in photos

Maritana Avenue, one of the town's two paved streets, looking south toward Manilla Street, 1980Manilla Street, the main street, looking north to old Highway 135, 1978Mauna Loa Avenue looking north from Manilla Street, 1980An old concrete foundation, 1980The abandoned Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range track, with the Corsica concentrator site in front, 1978The fenced Elba mine shaft with its danger sign, in snow, about 1981 to 1993Fire brick from the demolished Corsica smokestack, 1999Aerial photo, 1948, before the town was clearedAerial photo, 1961, after the town was cleared

Visitor reports

Been to Elcor?

Been there lately? Tell the next visitor what you found: whether you could get in, the state of the road and what's still standing. Photos are welcome. We read every report before it appears here.

Thanks. Your report reached us, and we'll read it before it goes on the page.

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Nearby

Other sites near Elcor

Straight-line distance from the townsite to other mapped sites in our Minnesota index.

• West Virginia6.1 mi W · St. Louis
• Spina14.1 mi W · St. Louis
• Fermoy21.7 mi S · St. Louis
• London45.8 mi SE · Lake
• Splitrock53.3 mi SE · Lake
• Taconite Harbor70.6 mi E · Cook
• Harlis75.8 mi S · Pine
• Belden82.0 mi S · Pine

Sources

Sources and credits

1. Wikipedia, "Elcor, Minnesota" (a featured article), retrieved October 2026: the mines and their dates, the M streets, the 1920 name, population and buildings, rents, the 1955 order and the moves, the remains after 1956, the 1976 stack demolition, the ownership chain to Cleveland-Cliffs, the 1993 stockpiling, GNIS elevation, climate and coordinates. It draws on Marvin Lamppa's 1962 thesis and the 1982 Elba-Elcor reunion history.
2. Northern News Now, "Cleveland-Cliffs predicts best Q2 in years; no update on Iron Range mine", April 20, 2026: Minorca and Hibbing Taconite idled last May with about 600 layoffs, and no restart plans mentioned.
3. University of Minnesota Borchert Map Library, St. Louis County air photo holdings: the 1948/50 Forest Service flight, symbol SLC, which matches the frame marking on the 1948 aerial photo.
4. Commons file pages for the photos, read October 2026: captions and dates from the photographer's own descriptions.
5. Photos: Wikimedia Commons, credited below each one. Elevation: USGS 3D Elevation Program point query. Routes: OSRM on OpenStreetMap data, October 2026. Not field-checked.

Photo and map credits

• Maritana Avenue, one of the town's two paved streets, looking south toward Manilla Street, 1980: DrGregMN, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Manilla Street, the main street, looking north to old Highway 135, 1978: DrGregMN, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Mauna Loa Avenue looking north from Manilla Street, 1980: DrGregMN, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• An old concrete foundation, 1980: DrGregMN, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• The abandoned Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range track, with the Corsica concentrator site in front, 1978: DrGregMN, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• The fenced Elba mine shaft with its danger sign, in snow, about 1981 to 1993: DrGregMN, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Fire brick from the demolished Corsica smokestack, 1999: DrGregMN, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Aerial photo, 1948, before the town was cleared: United States Forest Service, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
• Aerial photo, 1961, after the town was cleared: United States Forest Service, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain
• Area base map, topo and aerial imagery: USGS The National Map (public domain).
• Historic maps: USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection (public domain): Mc Kinley 1951, 1:24,000; Hibbing 1964, 1:250,000; Vermillion Lake 1994, 1:100,000.