An article in the Star Tribune a week ago about a visitor to Red Lake County, Mn, inspired me to dig into a memory about the former Lake George in Spring Valley, MN.
The
Sham of 10,000 Lakes: The Lie That Was Lake George
When
I was a kid, I went to Lake George to swim. This lackluster body of water, I
was told, was man-made and not one of the thousands of natural lakes
Minnesotans take pride in. Small and muddy though it was, it served its purpose
for me and for my naïve friends, who had no idea what a real lake could be
like.
For
all of my childhood and throughout my adult years until today, I believed that
the county I lived in and where fake Lake George was located was the only
county in Minnesota without a natural lake. I staked many a “getting to know
you” activity on it when I was in college and in my teaching career. When asked
to share What is one thing that makes you
different from everyone else in the class? I regularly responded, I’m from the only county in Minnesota that
doesn’t have a natural lake, just a man-made one! The others often took
pity on me for growing up without at least one of Minnesota’s 10,000-plus
natural wonders nearby for recreation.
Everything
changed today when I read the essay Christopher Ingraham of The Washington Post
wrote as an apology to Red Lake County in Minnesota for calling it “America’s
worst place to live.” That’s another story, and a good one. As I was enjoying
Ingraham’s description of visiting Red Lake County and the warm and friendly welcome
he received from its citizenry despite his widely-read condemnations, a small
piece of information popped off the page. Ingraham stated, “…there aren’t any
natural lakes in the county.”
What?? Red LAKE County has no lakes? Not even one? But it wasn’t just
the lack of a lake in a county named after the largest lake in the state that
got to me.
Stunned
and reeling from what I’d just read, something I’d come across in the newspaper
not long ago but had suppressed because of its potential impact on my beliefs,
came creeping out of my memory. At the time I
read it, I was sure it was a mistake. In a Star Tribune story about the Jeffers
Petryglyphs near Pipestone, the author had mentioned that Pipestone County has
no lakes. Today I had further
proof that everything I knew to be true about Fillmore County’s status as the
single Minnesota county with no natural lakes was turning into a lie.
What
to do next? I was getting frantic.
Aha! The Department of Natural Resources would tell me the truth, wouldn’t it? It
had to. The DNR keeps lake stats on its Lake Finder page. Find a lake by name,
or by county. Easy, or so I thought.
My
first stop was a facts page so I could find out the truth about which counties
are truly without even one lake. Oh no! There are FOUR of them…Mower, Olmsted,
Pipestone, Rock…NOT A MENTION OF FILLMORE COUNTY! Hey DNR, what about Silver Lake in Rochester, which is in Olmsted
County? Were all those geese and ducks that made the shores of the lake
slippery and disgusting with their poop deceived the way I was? Was Silver Lake
an optical illusion?
Confused
and discouraged, I searched the individual stats pages for the four lake-free
counties, expecting a big “zero” for number of lakes in each. Guess again.
Mower County lists six lakes, including the LeRoy Sandpit, of all things.
Pipestone County boasts eight lakes, four of which are unnamed, and Rock County’s
stats show five lakes. Olmsted County lists—get this—eighteen-- and yes, Silver
Lake with its excessive fowl excrement is among them.
So
even the DNR site has conflicting information. Are there lakes in those four
counties or not? Of course I had to check the Fillmore County stats, where two ponds in
Lanesboro made the list. These can’t be real lakes, can they? Maybe the DNR
identifies man-made “lakes” in no-lake counties so residents and visitors can
find places to fish or swim. Sure enough, the Mill Pond right here in St.
Peter, behind the police station, is listed as one of twenty Nicollet County
bodies of water designated as lakes.
While I think the DNR
needs to identify lakes being natural or not, the only
thing that doesn’t make sense to me yet is why I was lied to as a child. Even
my brother knew the secret that Lake George was a fake, making Fillmore
County barren of natural lakes. When he was collecting stories for a book for
the Spring Valley Historical Society, he discovered that long before we were
born, Lake George was formed as a holding pond for water that could be cut and
stored as ice after it was frozen. It was where they made ice for the city.
Nice bit of history to know.
Despite the deception I’ve believed and
shared all these years, memories of swimming at Lake George on hot summer days,
playing on the muddy beach, and searching the dried up fake-lake-turned swamp
for aquatic life on biology field trips in high school don’t depend on Fillmore
County being a lake-free oddity. My brother has great memories, too, as do
hundreds of kids who lived in our little town. Now another question looms: who was George?
9/7/15
P.S.
A little nosing around on the internet uncovered this article.
Among other things, it describes how
the original lake, built for recreation in the 1930's, eventually dried up, so a smaller version was
dug and given a sand bottom, making it usable for swimming. The story includes a reference to the Lake George's namesake, I
read the article once and promptly willed myself to forget George's
full name in order to retain a tiny bit of the mystery of the non-lake
from my childhood. :o )
Lake George, west side of Spring Valley, 1930's
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