Interstate Park - Cultural History

Cultural History

The St. Croix River was an important transportation route for Native Americans. Prehistoric tools have been found in the park, but no village sites. The first Europeans to pass through the Dalles were Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, and his 1680 expedition, though he made no particular mention of the site. Fur traders used the river extensively, and a French fort was located near the Minnesota campground in the early 18th century.

During the logging era from 1837 to 1898, logs were rafted down the St. Croix River. By 1857 a sawmill was operating near what is now the Minnesota campground, joined in 1867 by a boat-building yard. Both were owned by a leading citizen of Taylors Falls, W.H.C. Folsom, after whom an island in the park is named. The narrow gorge and the sharp turn at Angle Rock caused severe logjams in 1865, 1877, 1883, and 1886. The June 1886 jam is believed to have been the worst in history; at least 150 million board feet of logs were backed up for three miles (5 km). Neither dynamite nor steamboats with tow ropes were able to budge the jam. A crew of 175 men working 24 hours a day under electric lights took six weeks to break the jam, during which time several mills downstream went out of business. To control the water flow and prevent further catastrophic jams, the Nevers Dam was built upstream in 1890 in what is now Wild River State Park.

During this same period, the Dalles of the St. Croix became a popular visitor attraction. Steamboat service to Taylors Falls began in 1838, and a railroad connection was finished in 1880. The catastrophic logjams drew tourists in droves, as many as a thousand a day.

In the 1860s businessmen from St. Paul proposed mining the basalt of the Dalles to make gravel, a plan which galvanized interest in protecting the area. Locals had also been growing concerned by encroaching buildings and vandalism of the rock formations. A travel agent named George Hazzard became the leading advocate for a park, and gained the support of newspapers, several landowners in the area, influential people like W.H.C. Folsom, and ultimately the state senator and representative. These last two introduced a bill to the Minnesota Legislature calling for the creation of the State Park of the Dalles of the St. Croix and urging cooperation with Wisconsin to protect both sides of the Dalles. The bill passed in 1895, creating the second state park in Minnesota. Hazzard and his allies had a more difficult time lobbying the Wisconsin Legislature, but succeeded in 1900 with the creation of the first state park in Wisconsin, resulting in the first interstate parkland collaboration in the United States.

In 1906 the commissioner of the Minnesota park asked a family from Stillwater to conduct boat tours of the Dalles. Beginning with a small powerboat, this concession business grew quickly. In 1910 they began renting canoes and rowboats, and offered tours on progressively larger boats. Today they are still in business, family-owned for four generations.

U.S. Route 8 descends through the Minnesota park in a road cut blasted in 1931. The Minnesota Department of Transportation built stone overlooks and guardrails along the highway in the mid 1930s. Civilian Conservation Corps Company 633 arrived in 1935, building roads, trails, picnic grounds, plumbing, the beach and beach house on Lake O' the Dalles, and retaining walls. The CCC camp departed in December 1937 and were replaced by the 4610th Company of the Works Progress Administration in July 1938. Using basalt quarried in the park by the CCC, they built restrooms, picnic shelters, water fountains, and retaining walls. These historical structures are clustered in two separate areas of the Minnesota park: in the campground and near the Glacial Gardens. The two areas were added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1992.

In April 2005 a landmark rock formation called the Devil's Chair collapsed. An investigation found that the basalt pinnacle was toppled by vandals using crowbars and possibly a hydraulic spreader. Despite a reward for tips, the culprits have never been identified.