St. Croix Riverway Time and the River: A History of the Saint Croix

CHAPTER 4:
Up North: The Development of Recreation in the St. Croix Valley (continued)

Establishing the Interstate Parks

The conservation movement arrived in the St. Croix when George Hazzard organized a movement to create a state park out of the Dalles area. In the late 1860s, St. Paul street builders experimented with crushed trap rock from the Dalles to use for macadam roads in the city. Hazzard, who fell in love with the river and the Dalles as a young boy, was appalled at the idea. He had arrived in the St. Croix Valley in 1857 on the steamship H.S. Allen in the evening. "Those who made the trip remember its impressions," Hazzard wrote years later. "To others it cannot be described." His love of the river and its scenic beauty grew as he served the traveling public as a general agent for railroads and steamboat lines out of St. Paul. The Dalles of the St. Croix was always high on his list of recommended visits and the grateful appreciation of tourists whom he had steered there convinced him "that in the Dalles there was great value to the States of Minnesota and Wisconsin." When the Dalles began to be dismembered for road use, Hazzard conceived the idea of creating a park to preserve it for future generations. [92] His vision interested Oscar Roos of Taylors Falls, who deeded a considerable amount of acreage to the state of Minnesota, and State Senator William S. Dedon of Taylors Falls. Other leading citizens from Taylors Falls, St. Croix Falls, St. Paul, and Madison, such as Harry D. Baker, worked together to get Minnesota and Wisconsin to pass the necessary legislation.

The Minnesota Interstate Park was given birth on February 25, 1895, but it would take more time and lobbying to get appropriations needed for land purchases. In March park organizers brought a delegation of Minnesota legislators and more than a hundred "distinguished" guests to the Dalles to see for themselves the value of this scenic wonder. The Taylors Falls Journal followed up on this visit by printing a special pictorial issue extolling the beauty that should be saved. It was sent to both the Minnesota and Wisconsin state legislatures. On April 22, 1895 Minnesota passed the park bill by an overwhelming majority, although without appropriating all of the promised money. [93]

While the Minnesota side had received enthusiastic interest in the nearby state capitol of St. Paul, the Wisconsin legislature in Madison was much more reluctant to commit funds for the venture. "Appropriations for the purchase of the necessary lands within the park limits were very difficult to obtain from Wisconsin legislators," recalled Harry D. Baker, "because so few members of the legislature at that time knew anything about this part of the state." Unlike their neighboring state, Wisconsin had no state parks at that time even though it would later become a leader in conservation. Even when members of the park committee brought photographs of the Dalles to Madison, most legislators still remained disinterested.

George Hazzard, however, was not a man to be put off easily. Even though a Minnesota resident, he lobbied in Madison, often making a complete nuisance of himself. After petitioning and finally haranguing State Senator John M. True of Baraboo for hours, Hazzard received an appropriation to purchase Dalles land. For several years Hazzard and others continued this effort, "getting only perhaps five or ten thousand dollars at each session of the legislature," recalled Harry Baker, "at some sessions nothing at all." Some of the lands also had to be condemned by court action. But by March 1899, the park promoters finally secured the support they needed in Madison and the Wisconsin side of the St. Croix was secured for posterity. Hazzard was appointed commissioner for the Minnesota Park. It is "a monument to the energy and the enthusiasm and foresight not only of George H. Hazzard," declared Baker, "but to those men who had vision enough to see the possibilities of this picturesque and scenic area as the park that it has now become." [94]

Between 1901 and 1911, Harry Baker wrote numerous letters to land owners in the area following whatever scheme or strategy he could to purchase, claim, or condemn land for Interstate Park. As National Park Service lands specialists discovered a half century later, public land acquisition was neither easy nor popular. In a letter dated April 10, 1902 to a local landowner, Baker wrote:

The price you ask is at the rate of $25 per acre, which is over double what we would regard the land as worth. For any agricultural purpose it is certainly not valuable, as the natural meadows, which are a comparatively small proportion of the entire acreage comprise the only part of the land that is fit for anything but pasture. I have consulted with the other members of the commission, and we have decided to offer you $12.50 per acre for the entire tract. I doubt very much if any appraisers appointed in condemnation proceedings would value this land as high. [95]

Baker also authored entries for the Interstate Park in the 1903, 1905, and 1907 editions of the Wisconsin Blue Book. He most likely wrote the eloquent introductory summary for the 1901 edition as well.

Nowhere else are evidences of this power to rend and produce more magnificently portrayed than in the Dalles of the St. Croix, in Polk county, that matchless beauty spot just becoming known as the Inter-State Park, a veritable paradise of Nature's handiwork, owned jointly be Wisconsin and Minnesota, Wisconsin's 600 acres lying east and Minnesota's 300 lying west of the St. Croix river, the villages of St. Croix Falls in Wisconsin and Taylor's Falls in Minnesota situated at the very thresholds of the park. . .State money appropriated for the park is only used for paying for the land and making accessible the natural beauties of the spot. Artificial beautifying is seemed quite unnecessary. [96]

Despite the State of Wisconsin's reluctance to build the park, it eventually committed more resources to the project. Only 292 acres of parklands are in Minnesota, whereas 1734 acres are in Wisconsin "It was by modern values perhaps fortunate," wrote James Taylor Dunn, "that the continued litigation between William Hungerford and Caleb Cushing kept the falls of the St. Croix from being developed as a manufacturing center." [97] As a result, much of the Dalles land was available for the Interstate Park.

The Interstate Park attracted much attention in its first years. In 1898, Warren Manning, a nationally renowned landscape architect and secretary of the American Park and Outdoor Art Association, visited the park. He heartily endorsed the park movement:

We place upon the records of this American Park and Outdoor Art Association an expression of our appreciation of the work that has already been accomplished toward securing the Dalles of the St. Croix as forest reserve for the benefit of the citizens of Minnesota and Wisconsin, where native plants and animals that are fast being exterminated may be perpetuated and where they and the remarkably varied interesting geological conditions may be readily accessible to students. [98]

Manning's enthusiasm helped make the St. Croix Valley an artists' mecca. Back in 1891, Douglas Volk, who was the Minneapolis School of Art's first director, opened a summer art colony near Osceola. Volk's father, Leonard W. Volk, the founder and president of the Chicago Academy of Design, bought a summer home on Poplar Lake northeast of the town and made his talents available to the local artists. [99] Manning's endorsements in the 1903 Wisconsin Blue Book, which was repeated in the 1905 and the 1907 editions, gave the park and the artists' colony a high profile among nature-loving artists and aficionados. Warren Manning reinforced a new cultural emphasis on the responsibility of government to preserve natural spaces for the enjoyment of its people. [100]

Figure 35. The Namekagon valley lodge was owned by Chicago sportsmen and highlighted for potential members its access via railroad or automobiles.