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Rube and His Bears: A Short History of the Virginia Ore Diggers and the Team’s Time in the Northern League

By Rich Arpi

My home town of Virginia, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range, is best known for its iron ore and as the home of the Virginia and Rainy Lake Lumber Company, for a time the largest white pine sawmill in the world. Sadly, growing up I had no knowledge of Virginia’s rich baseball past. It was not until I got into graduate school and should have been working on other more important projects that I stumbled upon the existence of the Virginia Ore Diggers, to this day the Iron Range’s only . . .

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