Storms start to move out of Minnesota, continue for western Wisconsin

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Lake Minnetonka is known as a playground for the well-to-do and a drive around the lake or a boat trip across it reveals the luxury homes that exemplify that image. But how did it get so?

 in a new book called "By the Waters of Minnetonka." He joined The Daily Circuit to discuss his book.

1. After the Civil War, some of the biggest hotels in the country, including Hotel Lafayette and Hotel St. Louis, were on Lake Minnetonka.

 Southerners came up to the lake for the summer to escape the heat. When the Hotel St. Louis opened in 1880, it boasted 200 rooms and could accommodate 400 guests at once. Double-decker trolleys traveled from Minneapolis to Excelsior from 1906 to 1907, bringing day-trippers from the city. Today, there are no hotels on the lake. 

2. Lake Minnetonka was the site of a ginseng boom in the 1850s and 60s, and southerners brought slaves to work the plants despite laws prohibiting it.

3. Architect Frank Lloyd Wright was arrested for "white slavery."

 Wright built the Francis Little House in Deephaven and brought his lover and her two children to the lake. He was arrested in 1926 under the Mann Act, which "banned interstate transport of females for 'immoral purposes,'" he wrote. Wright's house is no longer on the lake, but parts of the home are on display at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the rest is at the The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. 

4. Delicacies for early settlers included dried beaver tail, woodchuck stew and baked raccoon.

5. European settlers turned native burial grounds into tourist treasure hunts.

Gallery

Emily Kaiser

Author

How Frank Lloyd Wright, slavery and grave-robbing Europeans tell the story of the lake's not-so-pleasant past.

A drive around the lake or a boat trip across it reveals the luxury homes that exemplify that image. But how did it get so?

5 things you might not know about Lake Minnetonka's past

Go Deeper.

Like this?