Our corporate history started in 1890, but the story really began more than 200 years earlier. It was the ignition of what eventually became an international mining and minerals group.

According to legend, the history of iron ore and LKAB started with a squirrel hunt outside the village Masugnsbyn, 89 km southeast of Svappavaara. The year was 1642 when farmer Lasun Lassi (Lars Larsson in modern Swedish) found a peculiar piece of black rock there.

He brought the stone to merchants in Torneå in Finland, which was then a part of Sweden. It turned out to be a piece of iron ore. The discovery was reported to the Lord High Chancellor of Sweden, Axel Oxenstierna. The wheels were set in motion, so to speak.

The forgotten and the unknown

The deposits in Masugnsbyn was not the end of it. Ten years after Lasun Lassi’s discovery, sami Uulan Tolkki found copper and reported it to Abraham Momma, the owner of the nearby Kengis mill. These two deposits became the backbone of Kengis mill, that was then the world’s northernmost mill.

The same Momma later discovered iron ore deposits in Gällivare, but those were somehow forgotten. It was not until 1740 that the extraction actually started, after the find was first rediscovered by a farmer in the 1690’s and eventually claimed by lieutenant Carl Thingwall in 1735.

Not all parts of this story is fully known. An example of this is our knowledge about the history of iron ore in Luossavaara (Kiruna). The discovery of this deposit is attributed to Sami Amund Amundson Mangi, who informed the state about it and the location in 1736 in exchange for 100 riksdaler (the Swedish currency at the time) and life-long tax exemption.

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