The Ohio Democrat

New York Investigator.

Good judges say that one of the next localities to achieve distinction by jumping from a substantial town to a thriving metropolis in a few years will be the city of Superior, Wisconsin, and this, too, without the effort and struggle through which interior towns have passed while effecting the same result. Until a year or two ago the average man did not stop to think that Superior as a monopolist of the water and rail termini at one end of the lakes is in the same position as Buffalo at the other end. Figures are uninteresting unless given briefly, but comparisons are always important. This little Superior, credited by its last census with only 22,000 people, handled more coal last year than did Chicago; of grain, it shipped nineteen million bushels; of flour, sixteen hundred thousand barrels; of wool, four million pounds; of merchandise, to the value of thirteen million dollars. Of all lake cities this business was second only to Chicago in magnitude. There is an economical reason for this condition of things. It is that the rail rate on freight sent west of Lake Michigan is one cent per ton per mile, while the water rate is one-tenth of one cent per ton per mile. This position at the extreme western end of Lake Superior is what gives the city of Superior its prestige, and is making it grow faster than Chicago ever did. Besides one hundred and one smaller industrial concerns, Superior has located twenty-eight large manufacturing enterprises in the past eighteen months, including the American Steel Barge Company, the builders of the famous "whaleback" vessel, which is revolutionizing the lake and ocean freight carrying trade. The twenty-eight institutions above mentioned, include iron and steel plants, flour mills, stove foundries, wagon factories, pump makers, shipbuilders and saw and shingle mills. The most conservative business men in the Northwest believe that Superior will grow faster in the next ten years than any other city in that prosperous section of the country, and many of them claim that Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Milwaukee have never seen the rapid growth that will come to the head of the great chain of lakes and the city of Superior.