A Minneapolis history site: Minnehaha Falls and Minnehaha Park in old pictures
It’s that fence that helps date this picture. Most likely it was taken after the scandalous 1857 purchase of Fort Snelling by Franklin Steele and his shadowy partners from Back East. That was the first time that Steele owned the Falls of Minnehaha.
Here’s another nicely posed tourist at Minnehaha, on the Park Board’s large stone platform. During the 1890’s, the Park Board also built the boulder wall that still exists today on the north side of the gorge.
Some early stone retaining walls are shown in this picture of the first landing on the south side of the Minnehaha gorge.
This landing was rebuilt sometime after 1958. The flooding shown may be from recent heavy rains, or it might be an unsolved groundwater engineering problem.
In 1889, the Minneapolis Park Board finally took control of Minnehaha Falls. After years and years of legal fighting over this land (but with more lawsuits to come) the Park Board ultimately prevailed.
Here’s a (likely) 1900’s image with the Falls of Minnehaha, just exactly framed. Everyone likes to photograph the waterfall: They always have and they always will. But look for the little details in the backgrounds and corners, those incidental features in these old pictures tell the interesting history.
That’s not an especially sturdy construction, compared to the stone bridge that sits there today. In fact, in September of 1903, the bridge across the stream as well as the dam upstream above the falls washed away in heavy rains. The Park Board noted, “The bridge was a great convenience to the patrons of the park, and one to take its place of the proper kind and in the right location is one of the problems that we have to solve.”
The Board instructed Superintendent William Berry to have a temporary bridge built across the creek above the falls in April of 1904. Though construction was reportedly underway nearby for a permanent and sturdy bridge, the temporary bridge collapsed on May 29, 1904, dropping people into the water. One woman nearly went over Minnehaha Falls.
And in 1906, Theodore Wirth was superintending the parks system and was out to make a big splash in his first year. He declared that “the low wooden footbridge above the falls is a cheap crude structure and should be replaced with a cut stone bridge, or, better yet, a reinforced concrete structure with a boulder arch-ring and rubble stone parapet walls.”
It’s unknown if this picture shows the bridge that washed away in 1903, the temporary bridge that collapsed in 1904, or the sturdy replacement under discussion in 1906. It could even be an earlier bridge yet, from the 1890s.
Between the bridge and the Falls, the Park Board installed a barbed wire fence, just barely visible here. Perhaps then, as now, people threw pennies into the creek and this was to keep people from trying to reach them when the water was low.
A Park Board groundskeeper was busy raking the grass just above this now-long-gone stonework and iron railing.
Peeking into the depths of this picture, we see that more barbed wire fence was installed. Who knows why, as it looks like this fence just wanders across the park.
Mollie Carbutt is, again, quite prettily posed against the butternut tree, while the Wilsons gaze across the gorge. Edward L. Wilson was a prominent publisher of the “Philadelphia Photographer” magazine, which seems to have had some national acclaim. And John Carbutt was among the most inventive and studious of early photographers. This image was printed as a photograph and pasted into the “Philadelphia Photographer.”
This undated photo from some time in the 1890s shows a place to sit built into the edge of the park board platform. That seating seems not to have lasted into the 20th century (see images in older posts, below).
Stone construction is hard, heavy work. Probably this was rebuilt because of the basic instability of the site.
This photo is was taken on June 11, 1904, and shows that the Park Board’s viewing platform wasn’t holding up as well as one might hope. This looks like a combination of vandalism and deterioration, with groundwater probably playing a part in the crumbling edge. The land where this platform was looks like this today:
We can’t get this view of Minnehaha Falls today. After the Park Board took ownership of Falls, they built a huge stone platform just where the photographers used to have people pose. Not everyone liked this behemoth. Charles “Father of the Parks” Loring wrote: