The origin story of Iron County is right in its name.
Communities like Hurley and Montreal grew up around a booming iron mining industry in the 20th century.
Now that mining has long since departed, leaving continued economic challenges, why do people still make their home there?
Amanda McMillan Lequieu, a Drexel University sociology professor, addresses that question for Iron County and another Rust Belt community, southeast Chicago. It’s the theme of her new book, “Who We Are Is Where We Are: Making Home in the American Rust Belt.”
“Certainly, moving, out-migrating from a place that’s facing some sort of crisis, like a large-scale economic crisis, that’s a good strategy. A lot of people in Iron County and other places across the American Midwest did that following deindustrialization,” McMillan Lequieu said in an interview with WXPR. “But that doesn’t mean that those who stay are stuck.”
In spotlighting Iron County – and the former steel mill neighborhoods of southeast Chicago – McMillan Lequieu conducted 120 interviews for the book.
In interviews, people in northern Iron County sometimes expressed nostalgia about the mining days. But they also identified compelling reasons for staying.
“Often, my long-term residents in Iron County pointed to positive reasons for staying. They said again and again that they loved where they lived. The four seasons, the snow, the landscape itself, the beauty of the Northwoods attracted them to stay in place. That meant that they did whatever they could to just make ends meet,” McMillan Lequieu said.
McMillan Lequieu’s interest in Iron County was first sparked by Gogebic Taconite’s proposed four-mile-long open-pit iron ore mine in the area in the mid-2010s. That mine never materialized. But it got her thinking about the holdovers from a previous mining era. A peak of more than 10,000 people lived in Iron County before the area lost 40 percent of its population after the last mines closed in the 1960s.
“I was curious about, what does it mean for a place created for iron ore – it’s in the name, Iron County – to have this potential rejuvenation of the original reason, the raison d’etre, the reason economically that this place initially was consolidated and formalized as part of the state of Wisconsin, how was it for people living there to see iron, perhaps, as a new economic opportunity, and then, for that door to close?” McMillan Lequieu said.
In studying Iron County, McMillan Lequieu heard echoes of her own upbringing.
“These are the questions that reminded me of my childhood in an economically challenging but close-knit community in western Pennsylvania. I wanted to spend some time thinking really seriously, in a scholarly, research way, about the idea of home,” she said. “How do people stay long-term in places that are objectively hard, sometimes, to make ends meet?”
McMillan Lequieu’s book is replete with academic references, footnotes, maps, and charts. But it’s also easily digestible for a lay reader. With the premises outlined in the book, McMillan Lequieu hopes to reach audiences beyond just Iron County or the Rust Belt more generally.
“I hope to reach a group of readers that perhaps have grown up with the narrative that they should just move, that being connected to a place doesn’t really matter anymore…we can do our work from anywhere, do our school from anywhere, it doesn’t really matter if we’re close to home. I want to provide this story as an antidote to that,” she said.
Listen to the full interview with Amanda McMillan Lequieu by clicking the player above.
