CONSERVATION DISTRICT PRESERVING A GEM

By Loretta Harding news@presspubs.com

Approximately 15,000 years ago, White Bear Lake was formed by melting ice blocks in glacial moraines and became one of the largest lakes in the future Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.

The 2,416-acre lake, located within both Ramsey and Washington Counties, has a maximum depth of 83 feet. It is large and deep for a normal metropolitan lake. White Bear Lake has three distinct basins: the north basin has a maximum depth of 30 feet; the west basin is shallow with a maximum depth of 22 feet, and the southeast basin has a maximum depth of 83 feet.

White Bear Lake, both directly and indirectly, is spring-fed with three major underwater springs located near the peninsula and northeast of Manitou Island.

The first people living around White Bear Lake were the Dakota and Ojibwe Indian tribes, who used it for their migratory hunting and harvesting grounds. In fact, nine Indian mounds were once located on the northwest shores of the lake.

Several legends offer different explanations about how the lake got its name. One version has it that the White Bear Lake got its name from a Sioux legend about a hunter who killed a white bear on Manitou Island, and whose spirit still lives on Manitou Island.

The U. S. government designated the area as Dakota land in an 1825 treaty, but later purchased all Dakota territory east of the Mississippi River to open it for European-American settlement.

When white settlers arrived in the area, attracted by abundant game and scenic lakes, land first became available for sale in 1847 at the price of $1.25 per acre. In 1858, the year Minnesota became a state, these first EuropeanAmerican settlers established White Bear Township, which consisted of 36 square miles of land. All of the land in White Bear Township was purchased by 1860.

The first official settler in what is now the City of White Bear Lake was V. B. Barnum, who purchased land in 1852 between Goose Lake and White Bear Lake. He built the first resort hotel, which became the Leip House, on the lake. As word of the area's scenic landscape White Bear Lake Area Historical Society