7.1. SR 07-29-2002 - Laserfiche WebLink

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The confluence of the Elk and Mississippi rivers was a well- known locale to Indians, fur traders and explorers for centuries before permanent Euro-American settlement. 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, translated as Double River, or by Allen as Parallel River, alluding to its course nearly parallel with the Mississippi? Upham suggests that the herds of elk found in the vicinity by Pike and later explorers and fur traders account for the present name, and both Elk River and Elk Lake appear on the first map of Minnesota Territory published in 1850. This glacial landscape occupies an area of marginal terrain, where woodlands edge prairies. Gravel deposits are common, and the soils are not rich and do not retain moisture well. Like much of surrounding Sherbume County, the relatively flat, sandy soils of Elk River Township provided good acreage for grazing and crop raising, and particularly potatoes. Early permanent Euro-American settlers seeking farmland found a hilly, forested belt in the northern part of the township, while there was level prairie in much of the southeastern comer. Trott and Tibbett's brooks drain the township from east to west; early historians noted that hay meadows gathered along their edges? There are several small, shallow lakes, such as Twin Lakes in Section 24 and Eagle Lake in Section 13. Small ponds persisted within the Elk River townsite after settlement. One was located at Jackson and Main streets and another at Minnesota and Main. The steep bluffs and island and marsh landscape found by early settlers has undergone great transformation. The natural action of erosion and flooding has been greatly accelerated by mill, dam, and road construction as well as agricultural land use and gravel mining. The dam built by Ard Godfrey and John Jameson in 1851 immediately flooded a large portion of Section 32 above the river, a feature now known as Lake Orono. Sedimentation and debris from log booms and saw milling infilled the channels of the Elk and Mississippi during the first decades of settlement. There are several islands in the main channel of the Mississippi at Elk River. The largest, opposite downtown, encompassed about sixty acres in 1900. W. H. Houlton, J.B. Rogers, and Elk River Historic Contexts and Phase II Downtown Commercial Area Study 8