Marys were left in the lurch because the
owners refused to sell, Dibbott amongst them, and Worden, whose broad
river-fronting lawn was surrounded by the commercial section of the
rejuvenated town. Filmer's store had been enlarged twice, and so
complete was the popularity of the mayor that, with his sound business
instinct, it still held place as the local emporium.

At the terminus of the car line a new town had sprung up. In Ironville
dwelt the brawn and bone of the works. The place was not restful like
St. Marys, but a heterogeneous collection of sprawling cabins, corner
saloons and grocery stores where the food was piled on sidewalk stands
and gathered to itself the smoke and grime of the works when the wind
came up from the south. Here were the Poles and Hungarians and Swedes,
with large and constantly increasing families, and to them the sun rose
and set in pulp mills and machine shops, blast furnaces and the like.
They were mostly big men and strong, who sweated all day and came back,
grimy, to eat and then spend the long evenings at the corner saloons or
fishing in the upper bay, or sometimes taking the car down to St.
Marys, and walking about surveying the comfortable old houses and
carefully kept lawns. And of Ironville, St. Marys did not think very
much, save that it was dirty and unattractive and, unfortunately, quite
a necessary evil.

Back in the country new farms were cleared on heavily timbered land and
the farmers found instant market for all they could raise. But the
bush still stretched unbroken a little further to the north, and while
Clark's engineers spent millions to harness the mighty flow of
Superior, the beaver were building their dams in a tamarac swamp not
five miles from the works.

All this was indissolubly linked with Philadelphia. Parties of
shareholders, large and small, came up in special cars to inspect the
plant. These visits were well organized. They found everything going
at full blast, everything was explained by the magnetic Clark and there
followed banquets at the new hotel, when both shareholders and
directors spoke and Filmer voiced the sentiments and pride of the town,
and the shareholders went away a little staggered by the size and
potentiality of their business but determined to back Clark to the
limit and carrying away with them ineffaceable impressions of his
strong and hypnotic personality. It was, after all, as they said, a
one man show.

Interest grew in