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William Thomas Bailey (September 22, 1842 - March 31, 1914) was a 19th and 20th century lumberman from Duluth, Minnesota.
| | This article needs additional citations for verification .(September 2020) |
William Thomas Bailey (September 22, 1842 - March 31, 1914) was a 19th and 20th century lumberman from Duluth, Minnesota.
W. T. Bailey was born in Baylysboro, Ontario on September 22, 1842 to James Joseph and Catherine C. Bailey of England (James) and Canada (Catherine). After gold was discovered in California, James Joseph set out in search of gold and was never heard from again. It is believed he met a violent end.
By the age of 10, William Thomas was an orphan. Bailey took a job in the railroad industry to support himself, which he became the purchasing agent for Northwestern Railroad which was headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.
In the 1880s, Bailey migrated to Duluth, Minnesota in which his skills as an organizer and businessmen enabled him to start up in a new enterprise, lumber. While corporate offices remained in Duluth, Bailey's company logged extensively in northeastern Minnesota. His mill was found in Virginia, Minnesota, where his son Richard Robert Bailey had local headquarters since 1896.
He started his lumber mill in 1897 on Virginia Lake (also known as Bailey's Lake) in Virginia, MN. The lake adjacent to Bailey's Lake is Silver Lake, upon whose shore was the largest white pine mill in the world at its time. This mill was the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company and was a totally different enterprise and had no relationship to the Baileys. Production of this mill was approximately one million board feet of white pine lumber per day. There is a statue dedicated to the logging, lumbering, and mining industries on the shore of Silver Lake. Bailey's old residence still stands today at 816 5th Avenue South, across the street from the old Coates residence (Coates who owned the Coates Hotel in Virginia).
Between William T. Bailey company and Dan H. Moon's company (Moon & Kerr Lumber Co.), it caused the first major economic and population boom of white settlers, businessmen, and pioneers. Before Leonidas Merritt discovered iron deposits in Mt. Iron, the Iron Range main economic force was lumber. After iron was discovered, the lumber industry received ample amount of business from the mines, thus solidifying Bailey's sawmill as one of the major catalysts of industry to happen in Virginia, Minnesota.
Bailey's son R. R. Bailey owned 97% of the stock in Bailey's company until it was divided amongst W. T. Bailey & his wife, his other son, and his other daughter (R. R. Bailey's brother, sister, and mother). Bailey's lumber company would remain as a business until 1951 when it was reorganized as Bailey's Town Pump.
The main sawmill closed in 1923. A small resaw mill operated on the same property until the early 1950s (still by the Bailey Corporation) when others bought the retail store and the mill. This then became Pohaki Lumber, which still operates today.
On June 25, 1873, William Bailey married Rebecca Roberts of Michigan (daughter of Richard and Rebecca Roberts of Ottawa, Michigan). Richard Roberts was a prominent lumberman himself. Together, William T. Bailey and Rebecca Bailey had three children: William Thomas Jr., Richard Robert, and Rebecca Bailey. All the family members were involved with the lumber mill, and they all held stock within the company.
In 1955, Rebecca (Bailey) Raley (daughter of W. T. Bailey) sued for liquidation of the company claiming that Richard Robert and other officials had fraudulently failed to inform her that the company was being reorganized. She stated the corporation failed; therefore the corporation should have been dissolved and the assets distributed.
Bailey considered himself a Republican that belonged to the Presbyterian Church. He was affiliated with the Masonic Order & local lodge and was a member of the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows. He was a man deeply devoted to home and family.
William T. Bailey died on Tuesday, March 31, 1914, at 10 a.m. CST in Rochester, Minnesota the age of 72. The Virginia Enterprise (now known as The Mesabi Daily News) reported on that day that W.T. had died due to surgical complication after undergoing kidney surgery for acute kidney problems.
W. T. had gone to meet with Dr. William James Mayo and Dr. Charles Horace Mayo of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota a few weeks prior to the operation. After the operation, William's health declined quickly and was declared dead the following morning.
The funeral was set to be held at the family home at 1317 East 1st Street, Duluth, Minnesota on Thursday, April 2, 1914, at 2:00 p.m. CST. Dr. Yost, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Duluth presided the event. Honorary pallbearers were Charles d'Autremont, B.F. Smith, A.B. Wolvin, and John Williams. Active pallbearers were Robert Whitesides, Daniel Healy, Frank Smith, Richard M. Sellwood, William Orr, and W. I. Prince. The interment was set for Forest Hill Cemetery in Duluth.
Virginia is a city in St. Louis County, Minnesota, United States, on the Mesabi Iron Range. Virginia prospered as an iron mining community, and is considered the commercial center of the Mesabi Range, serving as a shopping, industrial, educational, and medical hub for the surrounding communities. The population was 8,712 at the 2010 census. Virginia is a part of the Duluth MN-WI MSA
The Mesabi Iron Range is a mining district in northeastern Minnesota following an elongate trend containing large deposits of iron ore. It is the largest of four major iron ranges in the region collectively known as the Iron Range of Minnesota. First described in 1866, it is the chief iron ore mining district in the United States. The district is located largely in Itasca and Saint Louis counties. It has been extensively worked since 1892, and has seen a transition from high-grade direct shipping ores through gravity concentrates to the current industry exclusively producing iron ore (taconite) pellets. Production has been dominantly controlled by vertically integrated steelmakers since 1901, and therefore is dictated largely by US ironmaking capacity and demand.
Taconite is a variety of iron formation, an iron-bearing sedimentary rock, in which the iron minerals are interlayered with quartz, chert, or carbonate. The name "taconyte" was coined by Horace Vaughn Winchell (1865–1923) – son of Newton Horace Winchell, the Minnesota State Geologist – during their pioneering investigations of the Precambrian Biwabik Iron Formation of northeastern Minnesota. He believed the sedimentary rock sequence hosting the iron-formation was correlative with the Taconic orogeny of New England, and referred to the unfamiliar and as-yet-unnamed iron-bearing rock as the 'taconic rock' or taconyte.
The term Iron Range refers collectively or individually to a number of elongated iron-ore mining districts around Lake Superior in the United States and Canada. Despite the word "range", the iron ranges are not mountain chains, but outcrops of Precambrian sedimentary formations containing high percentages of iron. These cherty iron ore deposits are Precambrian in age for the Vermilion Range and middle Precambrian in age for the Mesabi and Cuyuna ranges, all in Minnesota. The Gogebic Range in Wisconsin and the Marquette Iron Range and Menominee Range in Michigan have similar characteristics and are of similar age. Natural ores and concentrates were produced from 1848 until the mid 1950s, when taconites and jaspers were concentrated and pelletized, and started to become the major source of iron production.
The history of the U.S. state of Minnesota is shaped by its original Native American residents, European exploration and settlement, and the emergence of industries made possible by the state's natural resources. Early economic growth was based on fur trading, logging, milling and farming, and later through railroads, and iron mining.
The Arrowhead Region is located in the northeastern part of the U.S. state of Minnesota, so called because of its pointed shape. It is a predominantly rural region that includes many expansive wilderness areas and several iron ore mining operations.
George W. Hopkins was a lumberman involved in the removal of tens of thousands of acres of virgin forests in Michigan and Florida.
The Seven Iron Men, also known as Merritt Brothers, were iron-ore pioneers in the Mesabi Range in northeastern Minnesota and the creation of the city that is now known as Mountain Iron. In the late 1800s, the Merritt family founded the largest iron mine in the world and initiated the consolidation of the American railway system into what would ultimately become the United States Steel Corporation. Their story was told, in part, by the book Seven Iron Men by Paul de Kruif. The book was first published in 1929.
James Playfair was noted for his entrepreneurship in the Great Lakes shipping, lumbering, grain handling, and industrial manufacturing businesses. He was a central figure in the establishment of Midland, Ontario, Canada. The son of John Speirs Playfair and Georgina Hall of Montreal, in 1889 Playfair married Sarah Charlotte Ogilvie (1858-1945), youngest daughter of Senator A.W. Ogilvie of Montreal, former president of Ogilvie Flour Mills.
The Animikie Group is a geologic group composed of sedimentary and metasedimentary rock, having been originally deposited between 2,500 and 1,800 million years ago during the Paleoproterozoic era, within the Animikie Basin. This group of formations is geographically divided into the Gunflint Range, the Mesabi and Vermilion ranges, and the Cuyuna Range. On the map, the Animikie Group is the dark gray northeast-trending belt which ranges from south-central Minnesota, U.S., up to Thunder Bay, Ontario, Canada. The Gunflint Iron Range is the linear black formation labeled G, the Mesabi Iron Range is the jagged black linear formation labeled F, and Cuyuna Iron Range is the two black spots labeled E. The gabbro of the Duluth Complex, intruded during the formation of the Midcontinent Rift, separates the Mesabi and Gunflint iron ranges; it is shown by the speckled area wrapping around the western end of Lake Superior.
William James Olcott was an American football player and mining and railroad executive in the Mesabi Range. He played college football for the University of Michigan from 1881 to 1883 and was captain of the 1882 and 1883 teams. After receiving his degree, he worked in the iron ore mining industry for more than 40 years. He was president of the Oliver Iron Mining Company from 1909 to 1928 and president of the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway from 1901 to 1909.
Morse is an unincorporated community located in the town of Gordon, Ashland County, Wisconsin, United States. Morse is located along the Bad River 7.5 miles (12.1 km) south-southeast of Mellen.
Elcor is a ghost town, or more properly, an extinct town, in the U.S. state of Minnesota that was inhabited between 1897 and 1956. It was built on the Mesabi Iron Range near the city of Gilbert in St. Louis County. Elcor was its own unincorporated community before it was abandoned and was never a neighborhood proper of the city of Gilbert. Not rating a figure in the national census, the people of Elcor were only generally considered to be citizens of Gilbert. The area where Elcor was located was annexed by Gilbert when its existing city boundaries were expanded after 1969.
Richard H. Keith (1842–1905), also known as R.H. Smith, was a coal and lumber businessman. He arrived in Kansas City, Missouri in 1871 with forty dollars and started a small coal yard. From that beginning evolved an empire spanning several states, that included coal, timber, sawmills, railroads, and even the building of towns.
The Duluth, Missabe and Northern Railway (DM&N) was a railroad company in the U.S. state of Minnesota. It was one of the earliest iron ore hauling railroads of the area, said to have built the largest iron ore docks in the world, and later was one of the constituent railroads in the merger that formed the Duluth, Missabe and Iron Range Railway.
Delos L. Filer was a businessman famous for developing Manistee County and the towns of Manistee, Filer City and Ludington in the state of Michigan. He owned sawmills and related businesses and was a physician, a merchant, a lumber baron, a real estate developer, and a philanthropist.
Herman Finger was a lumberman who owned and operated various lumber companies that operated in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ontario, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. He also served as the first mayor of The Pas after its establishment in 1912.
William McClellan Ritter was an American lumberman and businessman. He was the founder of W. M. Ritter Lumber Company. Ritter was a member of the War Industries Board during World War I.
