Louisville Swamp Unit
The centerpiece of this 2,600 acre (11 km2) unit is the marsh called Louisville Swamp. FWS staff estimate that Louisville Swamp floods three out of every five years, and trail closures are common. A water control structure helps regulate the outflow into Sand Creek, a short course which flows into the Minnesota River. The unit also includes dry lands above the bluffs which bear old fields, prairie, and oak savanna. The unit is located on the right bank of the river just north of Jordan, Minnesota.
There was once a Wahpeton Sioux village called Inyan Ceyaka Otonwe, or Little Rapids, here. The unit’s Mazomani Trail is named after a Wahpeton chief. Jean-Baptiste Faribault built a fur trading post near the village in 1802 and lived here for seven years. The exact site of the village and trading post are lost, but the remains of two historic farmsteads are still visible. The Ehmiller Farmstead is in ruins, but at the Jabs Farm two buildings have been restored and a third stabilized. The barn was built in 1880 by Robert and Anna Riedel. Frederick Jabs bought the 379 acre (1.5 km2) farmstead in 1905 and his family lived there as subsistence farmers until 1952.
The unit has thirteen miles (19 km) of trail for hiking and cross-country skiing. The parking lot for this unit is a few dozen yards past the Minnesota Renaissance Festival parking. Traffic during the festival (weekends from mid-August through September) significantly impedes access to the Louisville Swamp unit. Map
Read more about this topic: Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge, Refuge Units
Famous quotes containing the words swamp and/or unit:
“We read that the traveller asked the boy if the swamp before him had a hard bottom. The boy replied that it had. But presently the traveller’s horse sank in up to the girths, and he observed to the boy, “I thought you said that this bog had a hard bottom.” “So it has,” answered the latter, “but you have not got half way to it yet.” So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“During the Suffragette revolt of 1913 I ... [urged] that what was needed was not the vote, but a constitutional amendment enacting that all representative bodies shall consist of women and men in equal numbers, whether elected or nominated or coopted or registered or picked up in the street like a coroner’s jury. In the case of elected bodies the only way of effecting this is by the Coupled Vote. The representative unit must not be a man or a woman but a man and a woman.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)