Historic Contexts Study and Phase II Inventory (Downtown Elk River) 2022

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Elk River Historic Context: Landscape Setting, 1851-1950 This historic context extends from the construction of the first dam on the Elk River to the approximate completion of Highway 10. The Elk River and its confluence with the Mississippi were a well known locale to Indians, fur traders and explorers for centuries before permanent Euro-American settlement. Elk River is located in east central Minnesota in Sherburne County, about 125 miles south of Duluth and 30 miles north of Minneapolis. Sherburne County was set off from Benton County in 1856, two years before Minnesota statehood. Highways 10 and 169 intersect south of the downtown, and the Highway 101 bridge crosses the Mississippi River to Wright County. The Highway 10 bridge crosses the Elk River across a narrows in Lake Orono. The present incorporated limits of Elk River encompass 44 square miles including the former townsites of Orono and Elk River, as well as what was Elk River Township until its incorporation in 1978. The early townsites were platted on the north bank of the Elk River, which flows through Lake Orono northwest of the present city center. The Elk originates in northern Benton County and has a discharge of about 250 cubic feet per second at Orono Lake, comparable to that of the Sauk River where it enters the Mississippi. 2 Near its confluence with the Elk, the Mississippi River makes a sharp bend and is flanked by steep bluffs and marshes. The river divides Sherburne and Wright counties at this point. Construction of the Highway 10 bridge over the Elk River, 1940. Photo: MHS. Historian Warren Upham wrote that Elk River was called the St. Francis River by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers including Carver, Pike, Long and Schoolcraft. Beltrami and Nicollet, he notes, "used a Ojibway name for Elk River, Elk River Historic Contexts Study Draft 412002