Aaron Isaacs
By Victoria Laza
Duluth, the second-largest city on Lake Superior’s shore, was an international seaport and industrial force when its streetcar system was established in the late 19th century.
But it was a system that faced challenges unique to Duluth, mostly due to the city’s physical attributes, including some of the highest hills in Minnesota and the city’s oblong shape.
Aaron Isaacs’ new book, “Twin Ports by Trolley,” takes readers on a tour of all of the routes of Duluth during the city’s streetcar era.
The book’s format was established by Isaacs’ 2007 book, Twin Cities by Trolley, about the streetcar era in Minneapolis-St. Paul. He wanted to do another comprehensive streetcar history while appealing to people interested in local history.
However, this book appeals to anyone interested in streetcars and early mass transit.
The physical remnants of this era are gone, but Isaacs got his hands on an impressive wealth of research materials rich in interesting details, stories and images.
Isaacs edits Twin City Lines magazine and Tourist Railroads and Railway Museums magazine. He can’t remember when he first became interested in trains.
This photograph was taken in 1954. The Interstate Bridge is closest to the camera and the fixed span on the Superior end has been replaced with a trestle. Image: Minneapolis and St. Paul Newspaper Negative Collection, Minnesota Historical Society.
His father, who started the Minnesota Streetcar Museum in 1962 to save one streetcar, took him on trolleys and trains when he was a kid.
“I found it really fascinating to go and sort of figure out how they scheduled and deployed the street cars,” Isaacs says.
“I had thought about doing a book for a long time, but it was really about a three-year process, and the two things that made it happen was I made a research trip up to University of Minnesota Duluth … and I discovered that they had almost all the corporate records from the streetcar company.”
Isaacs keeps the archive of historic information and photographs for the Minnesota Streetcar Museum.
“We had a fair amount of stuff in our archive, but there was a guy who was 95 years old who was a native of Duluth and he was a member of our museum, and … he had been researching this himself for about 30 years, and he donated all of his working papers and a partially completed manuscript to us.”
This donation gave Isaacs the information he needed to fully flesh out his book.
The book contains hundreds of photographs from various sources, including the Minnesota Historical Society where Isaacs does a lot of research.
One of the most notable photographs is an aerial shot of the Interstate Bridge, built to facilitate traffic across the harbor and connecting Duluth and Superior. Prior to the bridge opening in 1897, a ferry took people between the ends of the streetcar lines.
“The two biggest challenges were getting up and down the hills and getting across the harbor,” Isaacs said. “And in the case of across the harbor, originally basically you needed a ferry boat to do it, or you walked across the ice in the winter time.
“And then when the first railroad bridge was built across the harbor you could take a train back and forth, although they didn’t run very often,” he said. “Once the Duluth street railway bought the streetcars in Superior, the first thing was to get streetcars crossing it.
“But they couldn’t do that until there was a bridge to do it on, and that was the Interstate Bridge.”
The Seventh Avenue West Incline built in 1891 climbed 500 feet up a hillside to take riders to and from downtown Duluth.
The cover of the book features a photo of the famous Seventh Avenue West Incline, which was built in 1891 to climb 500 feet up the Duluth hillside to take riders to and from downtown Duluth.
And between the covers are tales of such things as collisions with the Interstate Bridge, several fires, angry mobs and riots, excerpts of real customer complaints, the popular forms of public transportation that came before and after the streetcar era, lines that were planned but never got built and other surprising facts.
The book even details the uses people found for old streetcar and railcar bodies. They were turned into such things as trailers, chicken coops and even a café.
Two have been restored and now run every summer at the Minnesota Streetcar Museum.
“Twin Ports by Trolley” is published by the University of Minnesota Press and can be purchased on the publisher’s website and on Amazon.com.