Nineteen stained glass windows are telling a local story at the Ely Public Library.

Sandy Brandley described them as “the things that draw people to Ely plus the things that Ely was built on.”

The project has taken about a decade, starting when a new library building was under construction.

“When we started building the library 10 years ago, they were also working on a project in City Hall to do some renovations there. And of course this meant shifting around a lot of stuff,” Library Director Rachel Heinrich said. “And in the process, they found all this stained glass.”

The owner’s heirs didn’t want it, so some local artists were asked to use it to tell Ely’s story.

“It was a big enough gift that we thought the entire city should reap the benefit of it,” Claire Taylor said.

The first piece Taylor and a group of other artists made depicts a turtle on a log, which was appropriate for a library that keeps a pet turtle.

“It was a wonderful starting point,” Heinrich said.

There were enough sheets of stained glass left to keep going, and the artists stuck with the animal theme.

“We’re trying to use animals that are known widely,” Brandley said. “A walleye, a wolf.”

“A bear,” Taylor added.

“The bear, the loon. And so we just wanted to do things that children would recognize and say, ‘I’ve seen that,'” Brandley said.

Come 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic, Heinrich and the library found out the regional system was granting them funding for a public art project.

“So we said, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be great to have some more stained glass?'” Heinrich said. “And so we went out and did a formal bid process at that point, and the same group of artists said, ‘Well, we’ll bid on that.'”

They worked with the library’s art committee on a concept of depicting Ely’s history in pairs of stained glass windows.

“The first two represent the first people who came through this area. It would have been the first Americans and then the voyageurs,” Brandley pointed out two windows just to the left of the front doors.

They’re followed by images of logging and mining, transitioning into outdoor recreation like fishing, camping, and dogsledding.

Each window takes more than 50 hours of work.

“We figured it out after we did all of the bills for the windows across the front, after getting this wonderful grant that we were given. And we made $2.18 an hour,” Brandley laughed.

“But it was so worth it,” Taylor said.

The last piece shows three men: a miner, logger, and forester walking toward the Ely water tower.

“And those guys are walking into the future,” Brandley said.

“Great grandkids are going to look at this and realize where their heritage was in mining, in logging, in things that people don’t necessarily do a lot of anymore,” Taylor said.