History
In 1852, Ard Godfrey built a house, sawmill, and gristmill on Joe Brown's old claim, but he and his wife Harriet abandoned the site in 1871, as the mills at St. Anthony Falls economically overshadowed any commercial potential of Minnehaha.
The falls became a tourist destination, especially after the 1855 publication of The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. However, Longfellow never visited the falls himself. He was inspired by the stories of Mary Eastman and Henry Rowe Schoolcraft and by a photograph of the falls.
Beginning in 1885, the state legislature began acquiring the land to become the first Minnesota State Park. But in 1889, it was turned over to the city of Minneapolis for a city park. Residents and visitors could fish, swim, picnic, and visit a zoo. The park also featured pony rides and a refectory. Each year, 20,000 campers stayed in the Auto Tourist Camp in the park— it was closed in the 1950s.
Read more about this topic: Minnehaha Falls
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“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)