Later this month, the National Park Service is offering an interpretive tour of the Meeker Island Lock and Dam ruins, led by historian John Anfinson. Craig Cox attended last year’s tour and wrote about it for the fall 2007 issue of MOQ.
STRADDLING THE BOUNDARY between Minneapolis and St. Paul, the ruins of the Meeker Island Lock and Dam peek out from the gray waters of the Mississippi’s eastern bank, just downstream from the University of Minnesota campus. The mysterious concrete walls -- which had such a brief useful life that even local U.S. Corps of Engineers staffers were at a loss to identify them until a few years ago -- exist now as a stark reminder of the fierce inter-city rivalry that defined the great river’s development more than a century ago.

On a recent rainy Saturday, we stood on the bluffs overlooking the ruins with more than two dozen curious river aficionados as National Parks Service historian and author John Anfinson prepared to lead us down the century-old metal stairway and into a piece of river history few of us knew existed.

The tour ostensibly marked the 100th anniversary of the opening of the Meeker Island Lock and Dam, the first of its kind on the river, but Anfinson quickly reminded us that the story is millions of years old. A product of the last glacial till in North America, the limestone that forms the bluffs we were descending is nearly 500 million years old. Beneath that ancient limestone, however, sits a layer of St. Peter’s sandstone (“The purest in the world,” Anfinson said) that gradually crumbled, sending huge limestone boulders into the river. As recently as 1,500 years ago, he noted, we would be standing beneath a huge waterfall. By 1670, the river below was littered with limestone, creating some of the most dangerous rapids anywhere on the river.

“It was a much different river than it is now,” Anfinson said. Indeed, in 1805, when explorer Zebulon Pike attempted to paddle his canoe the 8.5 miles (and 110-foot elevation) upstream between what is now Fort Snelling and the falls of St. Anthony, it took him all day. He wrote later that any travelers who dared follow his lead should “think of the gorge as a waterfall.”

Fifty years later, those rapids remained essentially impassible for the estimated 1,000 steamboats that regularly docked at St. Paul’s harbor. Only about 50 made it as far as Minneapolis, a fact that clearly annoyed local officials.

While politicians and businessmen stewed, a local entrepreneur named Bradley Meeker decided to do something about it. In 1857, he proposed to build a lock and dam that would make Minneapolis the head of navigation on the Mississippi. It would also produce hydroelectricity, a relatively recent innovation that was already powering Minneapolis’s growing milling industry.

The news rocked the local political scene and created what Anfinson called an “acrimonious debate” among two militant factions in each city. In Minneapolis, the milling companies didn’t want another hydropower source that would compete with theirs; the mayor and other civic leaders, on the other hand, were salivating at the idea of attracting all that river traffic to their city. St. Paul officials knew that Meeker’s project would send all those steamboats upriver to Minneapolis, but they badly wanted the hydropower.

The fierce debate that ensued was abruptly rendered moot -- first by the Depression of 1857, then by the Civil War -- but it flared again in the years following the war. In 1873, however, the federal government directed the Corps of Engineers to pursue the project. Minneapolis had won -- sort of.

Standing on what remains of the controversial project on the eastern shoreline, Anfinson explained that political maneuvering over a federal land grant delayed the project for another 34 years. It wasn’t until May 17, 1907, that the lock and dam was finally open for business. The lock, whose gray concrete walls remain the only clear evidence of that dream, measured 310 feet long and 80 feet wide. The dam spanned 524 feet (“and a quarter inch,” Anfinson noted) from bank to bank.

But well before the Itura became the first steamboat to pass through the lock on May 19, events were underway that would spell doom for Meeker’s project. “St. Paul already had something up its sleeve,” said Anfinson.

That something was another, larger lock and a higher dam, which by 1907 was already under discussion. That political subterfuge combined with a nascent conservation movement and the rise of hydropower as a viable source of electricity was enough to quickly sour everyone on the future of the new lock and dam.

The federal government, under the urging of new President Theodore Roosevelt, was promoting dams that would not just aid navigation and generate electricity, but also provide recreational opportunities, Anfinson explained. Meanwhile, the new dams would have to deliver a more cost-effective source of power -- something that so-called “low dams” such as Meeker Island could not offer.

So in 1912, barely five years after the $800,000 project was completed, the Meeker Island Lock and Dam was abandoned in favor of what we know now as the Ford Dam, which spans the river beneath the bluffs of Minnehaha Park on the west and Highland Park to the east.

(It’s the Ford Dam, Anfinson noted, that “holds this river up.” Indeed, if those who want to return the river to its natural state by removing the three lock and dam structures between the downtowns of Minneapolis and St. Paul got their way, we wouldn’t need any bridges to cross the Big Muddy. “Without the dams, we could walk across the river,” he said. “The water wouldn’t go over your knees.”)

So, in the end, the steamboats retreated to St. Paul, Henry Ford built a giant automobile plant above the new lock and dam, and Minneapolis was cut out of the whole deal. (Minneapolis’s giant downtown lock and dam wasn’t built until 1963, long after river navigation ceased to offer any significant economic benefits.) But St. Paul took its lumps as well. Ford built the hydropower plant at the high dam as a way to power its manufacturing operations on the bluff. The company paid an annual fee of $95,000 for the rights to the power generated by the dam. For the entire 80-plus years that Ford has operated in Highland Park, that fee never changed. Last year, the company sold the hydropower rights to a Canadian company for $54 million.

Yet, as we moved downriver beyond the Minneapolis side of the Meeker site, there was plenty of evidence that St. Paul folks, at least, haven’t retained any bitterness about the whole affair. Indeed, said Anfinson, they’ve done more than Minneapolis to preserve these ruins and educate citizens about their historical importance.

The Desnoyer neighborhood organization, with the help of $380,000 of state money, has installed picnic tables and benches near the ruins and laid pea gravel and pavers on the old “wagon road” that winds its way back up to the top of the bluff.

“Now if we can just guilt Minneapolis into continuing this rivalry,” he said.

Anfinson will be leading two tours of the Meeker Island Dam ruins on Saturday, September 27, 10-noon and 1-3 p.m. For more information, go to http://www.fmr.org/participate/events/meeker_tour-2008-9-27