CULTURE

Cultural opportunities are important for our area's citizens.  Among the outstanding attractions available are:  the Little Gallery Art League, Virginia Historical Museum, Land of the Loon Ethnic Arts and Crafts Festival.   United States Hockey Hall of Fame, the Ironworld Discovery Center (a multi-million dollar facility depicting the culture and heritage of the Iron Range), and numerous other musical and theatrical groups drawn to the area by the community college system or the high school.  The community concert system works in conjunction with a number of other communities in the area and draws world famous talent to the area. 

THE ARTS

Organizations dedicated to the arts include: Little Gallery Art League, AIR (Arts on the Iron Range), Northern Lights Players, Arrowhead Community Concert Association, Virginia City Band, Virginia Heritage Museum at Olcott Park and the Laurention Arts & Culture Alliance and Fine Arts North (FAN).  The photo shown below is from the opera "Mikado", which was a joint production of the Laurentian Arts & Culture Alliance and the Northern Lights Players.

LIBRARIES

The Virginia Public Library is located in the city's center and is available to the public for reading pleasure and reference.  88,000 volumes represent books in nearly every field of interest.  6,000 new books were added in 1997 and over 238,000 items were circulated to approximately 13,000 borrowers.   In the popular non-book services, 250 magazine titles, 1,400 audio cassettes, 2,500 video cassettes, 500 books on cassette, and 600 compact discs are available.  The media center has 2 Macintosh computers available to the public for personal use.  The Virginia Public Library was the first public library in Minnesota to offer free public access to the internet.

An auditorium with seating capacity of 200 is available for library-related programs.  The children's room offers many educational and recreational programs.  Pre-schoolers may enjoy a regularly scheduled story hour.

The Arrowhead Library System is a multi-county cooperative library organization.  Twenty-nine public libraries in the participating counties of Carlton, Cook, Itasca, Koochiching, Lake, Lake of the Woods, and St. Louis are members of this system.
Headquartered in Virginia, the System provides rotating collections of adult books and additional reference sources to each member library.  Audio and Video tape collections and large print books are also available to any library that requests these services.
For the rural portions of the participating counties, the Arrowhead Library System has bookmobiles in service operation from Virginia and serving the 29 county area.  In addition, rural patrons are further served through a book-by-mail program which, in 1996, marked more than 76,000 circulations.

VIRGINIA ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AUTHORITY
City Hall, 327 First Street South
Virginia, Minnesota 55792
TEL: 218-748-7535
FAX: 218-749-3585
email: veda@virginiamn.us

||HOME||  ||THE CITY||  ||STATISTICS||  ||HISTORY||  ||EVENTS||
||RECREATION||  ||HOUSING||  ||LABOR & INDUSTRY||  ||HEALTHCARE||  ||EDUCATION|| 
||TRANSPORTATION||  ||UTILITIES||  ||TAXATION||  ||FINANCE||  ||DEVELOPMENT|
||CONTACT||  ||DIRECTORY||  ||GOVERNMENT|| 

                     please follow the arrow.
         
                                      

© 2001 Virginia Economic Development Authority
most photos courtesy of Lauren Nelson