NORWAY

Region: Iron River, Iron Mountain & the Menominee Range

Norway is an attractive town of 3,000. It makes a good impression on visitors who pass through it on U. S. 2 on the way to Piers Gorge and the Iron Mountain Iron Mine. Norway has trim, early 20th-century houses and tree-lined streets. It's a welcome contrast to the massive commercial sprawl spreading east from Iron Mountain along U.S. 2.
Sizable models of a Viking ship greet motorists on both U.S. 2 entrances, a symbol of the Norwegians and Swedes who came to work in the Norway area logging camps and iron mines. But a lot of Germans, Irish, Cornish, English, Italians, and Poles arrived as well. Still, Norwegian is the theme, and everyone promotes it. Next to each Viking ship is a sign announcing that Norway is "The City of Trails." It's an impressive accomplishment that a small group of energetic community leaders have raised tax dollars and grant money to build asphalt bike and walking paths connecting the town with outlying parks.

Just west of Norway is this artesian well. Locals claim it supplies the best water you can drink and fill their bottles from the faucet on the back. The spring emerged in 1903 when a 1,094-foot exploratory hole was sunk by an iron mining company.

Norway's small-town charm also comes from the unnerving fact that the town has been moved - twice. Iron deposits were so extensive here that the town was undermined to the point that streets collapsed and houses sank. Photographs from the 1890s show a much bigger and more impressive downtown where there's now a field, north of the present downtown. The first Norway was farther north on Main, up the hill, where a few streets of simple cottages remain between the two sunken pits.

Remnants of Norway's first phase survive in radically different forms. The Aragon Mine is now Strawberry Lake and park. (See below.) The farms and back roads here in the valley north of U.S. 2 are lovely. For a scenic shortcut to Iron Mountain's north side, turn north onto CR 396, which ends up at Lake Antoine.

Norway's feed mill on 9th Avenue may seem out of place in a region not known for agruiculture. But its main function is serving the many people around Norway with horses, which number well over a thousand.

By 1900, when the need for a third move to escape cave-ins had become obvious, Norway had matured beyond its rough and tumble boom years and was willing to plan for amenities of settled town life. Major buildings were built again over the next ten years.

The Vulcan Mine just west of Norway was the big iron ore producer in the area, but the Aragon Mine on Norway's north side was also active. The concrete skeleton of its shafthouse, still shedding chunks, is off Central Avenue in what is now a staging area for logging trucks.

Today Norway's biggest employer is a label-printing factory, part of the Milwaukee-based North Star Print Group. The 95 who work here in Norway make millions of labels, many of them on metallicized paper, for beer bottles, household chemical products such as "Snuggle," and food cans.

TheJake Meneghini Museum, a standout among local museums for its wonderful stories of Norway life, has now moved into a large new building on West U.S. 2. It's behind the unusual, European-looking house of Anton Odill, the Luxemburger who drilled the first tests for Norway's mines and stayed to build up the community. Some day museum board members hope to restore the house.

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PLACES AROUND NORWAY TO

Eat Sleep Camp