lake hiawatha name changes

in january, i photographed and harvested some of these stinging nettle stalks from the southern shore of lake hiawatha.

before the city of minneapolis dredged this shallow lake and contorted the sprawling wetland into a golf course in 1930, lake hiawatha was written on maps as rice lake. this was an english translation of the dakota peoples' name for this lake, bde psin.

(on some earlier maps, its marked as mud lake, and at one point a fort snelling military general tried to name it after his wife, which thankfully everyone just ignored)

to construct the rolling flat fairways of the golf course, bulldozers piled the earth they scraped from the bottom of the lake bed, doubling it’s depth from 5 to 10 feet. the manoomin, or wild rice, that had long covered the lake’s surface disappeared, was unable to reseed in the deeper waters.

when the city cut the ribbon on their new golf course in 1934, they changed the lake’s name on their maps to lake hiawatha.

this month, we’ll do a plant walk here on 3/30! more details to come but the plan is to stroll around, talk about place names, share plant knowledge and probably get way too excited about willow.