The Gunflint Trail was built step by step over the last century or so to access mining and logging projects, and Sue Kerfoot of the Gunflint Trail Historical Society and Gunflint Lodge knows a lot about how that took place. On March 9, she participated in a storytelling event about Cook County history at the Arrowhead Center for the Arts in Grand Marais.
In 1919, Kerfoot said, progress on the Gunflint Trail was made at the pace of one mile a week.
In 1930, Russell Blankenburg wanted to build a road to Saganaga Lake, but the U.S. Forest Service wasn’t interested in having a road on the public land that led to it. Blankenburg and a partner pieced together private property and built a toll road, “and I can tell you that to the day she died, my mother-in-law [Justine Kerfoot] was not happy about that,” Kerfoot said. The “toll” part of the toll road didn’t last too long. Kerfoot mentioned Walt Disney’s visit to the Gunflint Trail and a friendship between Ben Gallagher—after which Gallagher’s Island in Gunflint Lake was named—and Ernest Hemingway.
Billy Blackwell, who was instrumental in organizing the storytelling event, said that in 1925, the government designated 1.1 million acres in Cook County a game refuge and said no trapping was allowed. “All of a sudden you have 100 outlaw trappers,” he said. The government hired game wardens but couldn’t pay them, so they were allowed to trap for their pay.
The photo above depicts the construction of the Gunflint Trail.
This is part of a series about the tales of Cook County history that were shared at the Arrowhead Center for the Arts on March 9, 2013. The event was called “Stories you’ve never heard – and good ones to hear again!”
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