If you are a Bob Dylan fan, you most likely have seen the movie “A Complete Unknown” starring Timothée Chalamet.
The Nobel Prize-winning musician was born in Duluth and raised in Hibbing, Minnesota.
When I visited Hibbing, I saw where he lived from 1948 to 1959, when he graduated from Hibbing High School. On Hibbing High School premises is a large monument honoring the Nobel Prize Winner. Dylan credited teacher B.J. Rolfzen with teaching him “everything I know,” as documented in a 1969 Village Voice profile.
Hibbing High School is quite the star, too.
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, its $4 million (equivalent to $52,753,654 in 2021) construction was bankrolled in 1920 by mining companies to appease townspeople forced to move their homes from North Hibbing to make way for mining operations.
Massive murals line the main entrance. The ceiling is ornately decorated, and a trophy case is displayed on the school’s main floor, with records, photographs, yearbooks, and a proclamation for Bob Dylan Day in Minnesota.
This mansion of a building also features Tiffany Studios-stained glass and brass fixtures.
The school’s 1800-seat auditorium is patterned after the Capitol Theatre in New York City. The hall also contains a 1900-pipe organ from the Barton Organ Company. The chandeliers, which cost $15,000 each in the 1920s, feature cut glass from Belgium and are insured for $250,000. Tiffany Studios made the exit signs.
The library has a room-length mural portraying the history of Hibbing and the iron mining industry.
If you find yourself in the Iron Range in Northeast Minnesota, take a tour. It is a fantastic example of what money could buy in 1920 and the influence it had on Dylan’s music and art.
For more information about touring the high school, click here.
