History
Early plans to create a park along the Minnesota River were forestalled by World War II. It wasn’t until the early 1970s that the threat of development inspired concerted efforts to preserve the valley. An act creating the national wildlife refuge was passed in 1976.
Long Meadow Lake is spanned by a wood and steel bridge built in 1920. Known as the Old Cedar Avenue Bridge, it was turned over to the city of Bloomington in 1979 when the Minnesota Department of Transportation constructed a new bridge nearby. In poor repair, the old bridge was closed to vehicle traffic in 1993 but remained a crucial link for pedestrians and cyclists until officials closed the bridge entirely in 2002. The refuge managers, Bloomington and Eagan officials, and public interest groups have all expressed a desire to replace the unsafe bridge, but funds have not been yet been secured to remove the old bridge, much less build a new one.
In the late 1990s the Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport planned a new runway which would route air traffic over parts of the refuge. A real estate appraisal firm arbitrated a settlement to compensate the refuge for the environmental impact of the noise pollution. The airport’s commission voted unanimously to accept the settlement in 1998 and ultimately paid $26 million into a trust. Some of that money was used in 2004 and 2005 to purchase 420 acres (1.7 km2) between the Chaska and Rapids Lake Units.
Read more about this topic: Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)