Valley Creek, sometimes called Bolles Creek, is a small stream in Washington County, Minnesota. It is one of the few remaining trout streams in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area. Approximately 10 miles long, the stream begins in Woodbury, Minnesota and flows into the St. Croix River at Afton, Minnesota.
Valley Creek is notable as the location of the first private gristmill in Minnesota. It was built in 1846 by Lemuel Bolles several hundred feet upstream from the confluence with the St. Croix. Bolles' nephew, Erastus Bolles, built an additional mill and a blacksmith shop further upstream.
Famous quotes containing the words valley and/or creek:
“How old the world is! I walk between two eternities.... What is my fleeting existence in comparison with that decaying rock, that valley digging its channel ever deeper, that forest that is tottering and those great masses above my head about to fall? I see the marble of tombs crumbling into dust; and yet I don’t want to die!”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)