Discovering the Truth Behind Duluth’s Underground History

Duluth Has Many Tunnels Underneath the Surface

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Dan Turner moved to Duluth about six years ago, and found himself fascinated by the city.

“Duluth used to be this huge, beautiful, industrial city,” Turner said. “The more you know about [the city], the more interesting it gets – the history of Duluth is amazing!”

Last year he published a piece on Zenith City Online, documenting the history of Duluth’s underground tunnel system.

The first tunnel Turner was interested in was the drainage tunnel at Chester Creek.

“[Chester Creek] turned out to be a good place to start because it’s one of the biggest, one of the oldest, it’s one of the tunnels that goes through the most changes,” Turner said.

His research continued through the dozens of tunnels that are meant to carry rainwater runoff down the hill.

And as that research went on, he discovered a wealth of knowledge.

“I tried to find all the tunnels I could,” Turner said.

Many tunnels that haven’t kept their original uses still remain today.

If you walk the Superior Hiking Trail, you’ll find this tunnel at what’s known as Ely’s Peak.

Painstakingly carved into the side of the cliff in the early 1900s, this tunnel was used as a way for trains carrying ore from the yards in Virginia to deliver to yards in West Duluth.

It was abandoned in the 1990s.

But what about Duluth’s downtown?

“The word underground has a lot of connection, it has a lot of feeling to it,” says business owner Rod Raymond.

Raymond owns several businesses around Duluth, including Tycoons – a restaurant inside Duluth’s original City Hall building, built in 1889.

And specifically, Raymond owns Tycoons’ basement bar known as the Rathskellar.

The speculative history of that space intrigues Raymond to this day.

“The Rathskellar is a space – and the historians debate with me because they’re historical and I’m more entertainment, but I can be assured – pretty much be assured that people were drinking moonshine down here,” he says. “I can be assured that conversations that weren’t public happened down here and then they went up and voted in the council chambers upstairs.”

Given Duluth’s history as an affluent town of huge growth in the dawn of the industrial age, it’s hard to ignore rumors of secret activities happening literally underground.

“I’m also fascinated with the idea that there are these secret tunnels everywhere,” Turner said. “And people swore to me up and down when I moved to Duluth that here is where I would find the awesome tunnel system.”

But Dan Turner, as a historian, needed to figure out if there’s evidence behind these rumors.

“That doesn’t exist in Duluth,” he says, with a hint of dismay. “I mean, if you think about it, it doesn’t even really make sense. Duluth sits on bedrock. You’d have to really dedicate a lot of time and a lot of money and a lot of manpower to dig out tunnels under what we’re standing on right now”

Turner sought evidence for the real stories of Duluth’s tunnels.

And sometimes to separate fact from fiction, it just takes digging a little bit deeper under the surface.