Minnehaha Park is a city park in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, and home to the Minnehaha Falls and the lower reaches of Minnehaha Creek. Officially known as Minnehaha Regional Park, it is part of the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board system and is located within the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area, a unit of the National Park Service. The park was designed by landscape architect Horace WS Cleveland in 1883 as part of the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway System, and was part of the famous Upper Mississippi River steamboat. “Modern Tour” in the nineteenth century.
The park preserves historical sites that illustrate transportation, pioneer, and architectural themes. Preserved structures include the Minnehaha Princess, a Victorian-style train station built in the 1870s; John H. Stevens House was built in 1849 and moved to the park from its original site in 1896, using horses and 10,000 schoolchildren; and Longfellow House, a house built to resemble the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow House in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The park was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969 as the Minnehaha Historic District in recognition of its statewide importance to architecture, commerce, preservation, literature, transportation, and urban planning.
The central feature of the park, Mineha Falls, has been a favorite subject of pioneer photographers, beginning with Alexander Hesler’s Silver Plates in 1852. Although he never visited the park, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow helped spread the waterfall’s fame when he wrote his famous poem, The Ballad of Hiawatha. The falls are located on Mineha Firth near the confluence with the Mississippi Creek, near Fort Snelling. The Minnesota Veterans’ main home is located on a bluff where the Mississippi River and Minnehaa Creek meet. More than 850,000 people visit Minnehaha Falls each year, and it remains the most photographed location in Minnesota. The surrounding gardens are also designated for camps for people experiencing homelessness.
History
Settlement in the area began in 1805 when the U.S. Army purchased a nine-square-mile tract of land at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers from the home of the Sioux. Perched on the slope overlooking the rivers, Fort Snelling was built under Colonel Josiah Snelling between 1820 and 1824. In 1821, Snelling’s son William Joseph Snelling came to the fort after leaving West Point and spent a year with a friend of Sioux. According to an account of the History of Minnesota written in 1858, “In the year following his coming to the fort, young Snelling, accompanied by Joseph R. Brown, a frontiersman and local celebrity, set out to explore the river running the Min Ha Ha range, as far as Lake Min Tonka.” Both “men” were 17 years old at the time.
Some very early records refer to the falls as “Brown Falls” leading some historians to suppose that it was named after the prominent pioneer Joseph R. Brown. Park Ranger Kathy Swenson, who wrote for the National Park Service in 2009, says: “Inconclusive evidence indicates that Brown’s Falls (and creek) is named after Jacob Brown, Major General and Commander-in-Chief of the Army from 1814 to 1828 in place of Joseph R. Brown, A teenage musician at Fort Snelling and later a sergeant in the Army (1820-1828), fur dealer, politician, editor, and inventor. However, I have not yet found a document that officially or specifically mentions Jacob Brown as his namesake.” Swenson explains, “Browns Fall/Creek appears to be highly associated with maps and military personnel while ‘Little Falls/ Creek’ appears to be favored by those without a strong military connection although there are exceptions.” The current name is Dakota Waterfall (Mníȟaȟa, “curling water”).
Hiawatha brings fame
The name “Minnehaha Falls” was popular by 1855, when the publication of the song Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow brought it world fame. Longfellow’s epic poem depicts Hiawatha, a Native American hero who falls in love with Minnehaha, a Native American woman who later dies during a harsh winter. Longfellow did not visit the falls himself. His inspiration was drawn from the writings of Mary H. Eastman and Henry Roe Schoolcraft, and from the daguerreotype created by Alexander Hessler when he chose the name Hiawatha’s stud. The photograph was taken in 1852, according to a letter written by Hessler, as discussed in the journal “Minnesota History.”
“Modern Tour”
Beginning in 1828, steamboats began to travel up the Mississippi River as far north as St. Paul, the upper limit of commercial navigation in the Mississippi, until two dams and a series of locks were built between 1948 and 1963. The attention of tourists, and in 1835, the well-known artist George Catlin on American Indian life with a steamboat trip across the Mississippi River from St. Louis to St. Anthony’s Falls and Fort Snelling. Admiring the landscape, Catlin suggested a “modern tour” of the upper Mississippi, saying:
This tour includes only a small part of the great “Far West”; But it will give the traveler a fair sampling, apart from that which is now easily accessible to the world, and the only part of it that ladies can access, I recommend it to everyone who has the time and inclination to dedicate enjoying a great tour, don’t wait, but make it when the topic is new , and able to produce the greatest amount of pleasure.
After Catlin’s visit, each subsequent year saw an increasing number of spectators, artists, and photographers. There are hundreds of holographic fall display cards. Most of the visitors were men, but a few women made the trip, most notably 80-year-old Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, widow of Alexander Hamilton. The beauty of the region has also been spread by moving panoramas and panoramic artistic creations that are projected like today’s travel documentaries. Quoting a 1939 paper by the Minnesota Historical Society:
Crowds of people went to watch these travel movies in the 1840s and 1850s, and thus vicariously took a tour of the Great River. The crowds who wanted to see the Banvard panorama were so great when it was shown in Boston and New York that the railroads made special excursions to accommodate it. In these two cities alone, more than four hundred thousand people watched the exhibition. “The river comes to me instead of me going to the river,” Longfellow wrote. John Whittier, after seeing a panorama, sang “Our New Canaan Israel”, and Thoreau, who not only watched the panorama but also made the tour itself, envisioned “a heroic age to come in which simple and hidden men will be the true heroes of history, who will build the foundations of new fortresses [i] In the West, they throw bridges across the “Rhine of a different kind.”
According to an account written in 1852, the passengers disembarked from St. Paul and “[from there traveled by] the bus for what was called the ‘Grand Tour.’ It consisted of a car journey from St. Paul to St. Anthony, then out to Lakes Harriet and Calhoun, and from there to Minhaa Falls and Fort Snelling, and by Spring Cave [perhaps ‘Fountain Cave’] to St. Paul, in time for visitors, if in a hurry, to return by boat down the river.”
By the late 1860s, railroads expanded their rails to Minneapolis/St. With them, Paul began to actively advertise Minnesota as a tourist destination. The 1878 Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad Roadshow, a guide to Minnesota’s summer resorts, told of the delights and health benefits of traveling to Minnesota: “The landscape is unparalleled and the fresh air is so rich in oxygen and ozone that it is unparalleled anywhere in the world. Surely he will offer the tourist and the uninitiated a warm welcome, confident that one will surely find comfort and pleasure, and the other will find many earthly blessings – health. ” The brochure describes the bus trip from Minneapolis to Minhau Falls: “One of the popular excursions that few tourists miss is the journey from Minneapolis to St. Paul by bus. Starting from the former place on the west side of the river, a pleasant four-mile hike over a flat meadow, Brings the traveler to where Minnehaha Falls sparkle and sparkles among the oaks Laugh and jump into the canyon Round trip fare from St. Louis to Minneapolis was $30 and included Pullman sleeping cars The brochure lists Minneapolis’ population of 40,000 at the time. Grand National Scenic Tours Side Scenic
Fortunately for future generations, the state legislature in 1883 created the Minneapolis Board of Park Commissioners. The council began acquiring a parkland near downtown Minneapolis today. Their choice to hire famed landscape architect Horace Cleveland was fortunate. Cleveland was appointed by the Board of Directors to design a system of interconnecting gardens and walkways to connect and preserve the existing landscape. Cleveland was conservative by nature, respectful of the landscape’s features and using the existing terrain and vegetation to keep his designs as natural as possible. When the Park Board considered building a photographic pavilion in the Lower Valley near the falls in 1889, he replied:
I learned that the park commission is seriously considering a building in Minnehaha for the express purpose of taking pictures – on the site that one of the cottages has so far desecrated for this purpose. I cannot remain silent in light of this willful vandalism which I am sure you cannot punish – and which I am equally sure will forever be a disgrace to Minneapolis and the curse of every man of sense and taste who visits the place. If constructed, it would merely pander to the tastes of an army of boobies who would consider enhancing their reputation by associating their stupid features with a representation of one of God’s most beautiful deeds.
The result of Cleveland’s vision has been the famous “Grand Tours,” an interconnected series of parks and amusement parks centered around the Mississippi River. This vision was expanded by subsequent park commissioners and superintendents to cordon off a chain of lakes, now known as the “Chain of Lakes,” and follow Minnehaha Creek to Minnehaha Falls. The area was designated a National Scenic Trail in 1998, and today’s Minneapolis Grand Rounds is recognized as one of the best urban park systems in the world.
Acquisition and development
When Parkboard in Minneapolis purchased Minhao Falls and surrounding land in 1889, it became one of the first state parks in the United States; Only New York established a state park at that time. The following summer, the Park Board began supplying the park with tables, benches, and toilets. By 1893, a pavilion was built and the park agreed to fund two “rustic nature” bridges, one above the falls and one below. The food court was built in 1905 to offer “nature’s clean and wholesome refreshments at an affordable cost.” In 1926, the Park Board designated the park to be a center for winter sports activities; Plans were made to build a ski jump and the board purchased skis for hire. Major improvements including retaining walls, bridges, and stairs were made by Federal Works Progress Administration (WPA) crews from 1936 to 1942.
While campaigning in 1964, Lyndon Johnson and Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey visited the park. Johnson would go on to win the presidential election that year with Humphrey as his running mate. Their visit was celebrated with a plaque that read:
President Lyndon B. Johnson, Senator Hubert Humphrey, and Governor Carl Rolfagh enjoy a mist from Minaha Falls. But on that day, Minneapolis was suffering from a drought. In order to create a beautiful mist for the waterfalls pictured here, the city had to open several fire hydrants upstream and out of sight, to feed water into the creek.
The park experienced conflict in the 1960s when the Highway Administration planned an elevated highway between Minnehaha Park and Longfellow Gardens above Minnehaha Creek. The park’s board of directors challenged the plan and took the case to the US Supreme Court. Fortunately for the park, a similar decision was made in favor of preserving the park’s land, thus setting a precedent, and the elevated highway was never built. Eventually, a highway was built in the late 1990s that routed the route through a tunnel over the creek and covered with a “land bridge”. A new garden, Longfellow Garden, has been created on top of the land bridge.
Significant improvements were also made in the 1990s. Pergola Garden was created to display native wildflowers and herbs. The parking lot that overlooked the falls has been removed, replaced with a garden and a low circular wall inscribed with the words Longfellow. The old dining hall was fitted with a veranda and a shell was added to it. In 2007 a new river view was built in the Wabun picnic area and includes a children’s playground.
