08/02/2026
Rocky Taconite got his start as a dentist's daydream. Otto Ringle, president of the Silver Bay Jaycees in the early 1960s, had grown up near Bemidji, close enough to see firsthand how much tourism traffic the giant Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox statues pulled off Highway 2, and he figured Silver Bay, a town built entirely around Reserve Mining Company's taconite operation, deserved its own roadside ambassador. He sketched out an idea, not a lumberjack, but a bulbous iron figure made of two thick metal spheres, and pitched it to Reserve Mining, who agreed to fund the whole thing.
The build went to Star Iron Works in Minneapolis for a $500 bid, with a young ironworker named Neil Forsberg handed the job with almost no real specifications beyond "make it out of iron." He spent roughly two years figuring out how to construct the strange, rounded figure, eventually outfitting it with red boots, a red belt and buckle, red gauntlets, and a miner's helmet, one hand holding a pickax, the other raised in a permanent wave. Reserve Mining donated a genuine seven-foot chunk of taconite ore to serve as his pedestal, and the John W. Galbreath Company landscaped a plot of land in front of the Silver Bay Post Office to give him a proper home.
Reserve Mining ran a naming contest in April 1964, with local resident Louis M. Stefanich's submission, "Rocky Taconite," beating out the other finalist, "Petey Pellet." Rocky was formally dedicated on October 10, 1964, by Dr. E.W. Davis himself, the University of Minnesota researcher credited as the actual "Father of Taconite" for pioneering the process that turned low-grade iron ore into usable pellets and single-handedly saved Minnesota's mining industry once the Iron Range's richer ore deposits started running dry. The plaque at his base still spells out exactly what he's meant to symbolize: the transition of taconite to steel, dedicated to the researchers who turned a useless rock into an entire new Minnesota industry.
Rocky's fame didn't stop at the statue. After Otto Ringle's family spotted the bobblehead craze sweeping the 1964 New York World's Fair, they came home and started hand-baking miniature Rocky figurines in their own oven, using a recipe that actually incorporated real ground taconite, with the Ringle kids gluing alphabet macaroni letters onto the tiny helmets to spell out his name, selling them for a dollar apiece. Original examples are now genuine collectibles. Decades later, the Bay Area Historical Society revived the bobblehead with a professional manufacturer, and the new version became an unexpected social media star, photographed by travelers as far away as Vietnam and Australia who'd never actually set foot in Silver Bay.
More than sixty years after Otto Ringle first sketched him on a piece of paper, Rocky still stands on Outer Drive near Highway 61, greeting travelers heading up the North Shore, a strange little rock man that's quietly outlasted plenty of the actual mining operations he was built to celebrate.
