Archive for the ‘Lake Minnetonka’ Tag
Big Island, Big Book
Filed under: Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: Big Island, Lake Minnetonka, Minnehaha Creek
Leave a comment Just in time for the history buff on your gift list comes a big book: The History of Big Island, Lake Minnetonka. While the book is richly illustrated with historical photos and drawings, it is much more than a coffee-table book. It appears to be a labor of love by author Paul Maravelas: exhaustively researched, carefully written, and extensively footnoted.
Maravelas covers the entire recorded history of the island–and the lake–drawing from archaeological records, oral histories, journals, letters, newspapers, and official records. He takes the reader through the many purposes the island has served from maple sugar production and wild rice harvesting to farming to amusement park and campsite.
I especially appreciated chapters on what we know of the Dakota use of the island and, years later, the creation of an amusement park on the island and the role played by the streetcar line from Minneapolis. Of course, many of the names that fill accounts of Minneapolis park history pop up in the history of settlement and development at Lake Minnetonka and Big Island, too. As the source of Minnehaha Creek, Lake Minnetonka will always be off interest to many Minneapolitans, although the watershed isn’t the book’s focus.
I would expect everyone who lives at or near the lake would want this book in their library along with all of us city dwellers who appreciate local history and enjoy a good story.
The book is available from Minnetonka Press. Free shipping via USPS media mail is offered on the publisher’s website this month, which is a significant value as the book runs 470 pages and weighs 4 1/2 pounds. As I said: Big Island, Big Book.
David C. Smith
The Worst Idea Ever #8: Power Boat Canal from Minnetonka to Harriet
Filed under: Minneapolis Lakes, Minneapolis Parks: General | Tags: 1911 Minneapolis Civic Celebration, Lake Harriet, Lake Hiawatha, Lake Minnetonka, Lake Nokomis, Minnehaha Creek, Minnehaha Falls
Comments (1) Ok, it wasn’t really a Minneapolis park project, but it still deserves a laugh: Minnehaha Creek converted into a 30-foot-wide power boat canal from Lake Minnetonka to Lake Harriet!
Lake Harriet could have been more like Lake Minnetonka.
Minneapolis was obsessed in the spring of 1911 with the upcoming Civic Celebration during which the channel between Lake Calhoun and Lake of the Isles would be opened. That was a very good thing. Huzzah, huzzah. But the attention it was drawing to the city also focused a lot of eyes on a very bad thing: Minnehaha Creek was nearly dry — in the spring! — which meant almost no water over Minnehaha Falls. Minneapolis could hardly celebrate the opening of the lake connection at the same time it suffered the ignominy of a dry Minnehaha Falls. The many out-of-town visitors anticipated for the celebration would surely want to see both. And let’s face it, a fifty-foot waterfall written about by a Harvard poet, which attracted visitors from around the world was a bit more impressive to most people than a short canal under a busy road and railroad tracks. The Minneapolis PR machine could call the city the “Venice of North America” all it wanted with its new canal, but visitors’ imaginations were still probably fueled more by the images of the famous poet’s noble heathen, beautiful maiden, and “laughing waters.”
The generally accepted solution to the lack of water over Minnehaha Falls was to divert Minnehaha Creek into Lake Amelia (Nokomis), drain Rice Lake (Hiawatha), dam the outlet of the creek from Amelia to create a reservoir, and release the impounded water as needed — perhaps 8 hours a day — to keep a pleasing flow over the falls. Unfortunately, with all the last-minute dredging and bridge-building for the Isles-Calhoun channel, that couldn’t be done in 1911 between April and July 4, when the Civic Celebration would launch.
Into this superheated environment of waterways and self-promotion stepped Albert Graber, according to the Saturday Evening Tribune, May 28, 1911. With the backing of “members of the board of county commissioners, capitalists, attorneys and real estate dealers”, Graber proposed to dredge Minnehaha Creek into a canal 30-feet wide from Lake Minnetonka to Lake Harriet. This would provide not only a water superhighway from Minnetonka to Minneapolis, and boost real estate prices along the creek, but it would also create a much larger water flow in Minnehaha Creek, solving the embarrassment of no laughing water.
“The plan, say the promoters, would enable residents of summer houses on the big lake to have their launches waiting at the town lake.”
Saturday Evening Tribune, May 28, 1911
Sure, there were problems. Not every plan could be perfect. The plan would require dismantling the dam at Gray’s Bay at the head of Minnehaha Creek, which might lower the level of Lake Minnetonka. But Graber and his backers had thought of that. The Minnesota River watershed in the area of St. Bonifacius and Waconia would be diverted into Lake Minnetonka — no problem! — which also solved another bother: it would reduce flooding on the Minnesota River.
The dam at Gray’s Bay had been operated by Hennepin Country since 1897. Many people then and now consider the dam the cause of low water flow in Minnehaha Creek, but the earliest reference I can find to low water in the creek was in 1820, when the soldiers of Fort Snelling wanted to open a mill on Minnehaha Creek, but were forced to move to St. Anthony Falls due to low water. That was even before two intrepid teenagers from the fort discovered that the creek flowed out of a pretty big lake to the west.
Graber estimated that dredging Minnehaha Creek would cost about $4,000 a mile for the nine miles between the two lakes. He and his backers, which included an officer of the Savings Bank of Minneapolis (who presumably had a summer house on the big lake and could put a launch on the town lake), provided assurances that the money to finance the project could be “readily found.”
The Evening Tribune article concluded with an announcement that meetings of those interested in the project would be held in the near future with an eye to beginning work before the end of the summer. Graber noted that his inspection of the project had been, no surprise, “superficial”, but that he would make a thorough report soon to his backers. I can find no evidence that the idea progressed any further.
The Board of Park Commissioners would have had no role in the plan, except, perhaps, allowing power boats to enter and be anchored on Lake Harriet. (I think they would have said no.) Park board ownership of Minnehaha Creek west of Lake Harriet to Edina wasn’t proposed until 1919 and the deal wasn’t done until 1930.
David C. Smith
© 2013 David C. Smith
The first environmental legislation in Minneapolis?
Filed under: Lake Calhoun | Tags: Clean Water Legislation, Lake Calhoun, Lake Minnetonka
Leave a comment Minneapolis has acquired parks in less time than it’s taken me to start this blog. No joke. I was planning to get this blog going well before the park board considered acquiring the Scherer Brothers site along the Mississippi River in Northeast. Now that acquisition is completed. Brilliant, by the way. A no-brainer. Above the Falls will someday be as spectacular as Below the Falls. Different, but spectacular — nearly 100 years after the first suggestions that the park board acquire the banks of the Mississippi above St. Anthony Falls. It’s happening bit by bit. As in the early days. It took the park board several attempts and nearly twenty years after its creation to acquire the river banks below the falls. The goal then was to preserve land for public use, to prevent it from being destroyed. Now it is to reclaim it.
Which brings me to an interesting bit of information on early preservation and environmental protection efforts in Minneapolis. On February 26, 1879, four years and one day before the Minnesota legislature created a Board of Park Commissioners for Minneapolis it passed Chapter 339 of the Special Laws of Minnesota, entitled “An Act To Preserve The Purity Of Certain Lakes In Hennepin Country By Prohibiting The Discharge Or Deposit Of Impure Or Deleterious Matter Into The Waters Thereof.”
The law declared it unlawful for any person to “deposit, place or empty” into the waters of Lake Calhoun or Lake Minnetonka any “putrid or decayed animal or vegetable matter, or impure liquid, or to erect any building, stable or outhouse on the bank or shore of either of said lakes, from which any deleterious deposit or matter may fall into or reach the waters of either of said lakes, or to discharge or drain into either of said lakes any impure liquid or substance whatever which shall defile the waters thereof and render the same impure for drinking or household use or in any wise deleterious to health.”
Was this the first “clean water” legislation in Minnesota?
In a later post I’ll provide one good reason why Lake Calhoun was singled out in Minneapolis. And, yes, it does have something to do with railroads.
David C. Smith
Minneapolis Park History 