Maple Lake is a

lake A lake is often a naturally occurring, relatively large and fixed body of water on or near the Earth's surface. It is localized in a basin or interconnected basins surrounded by dry land. Lakes lie completely on land and are separate from ...

in central

Polk County, Minnesota Polk County is a county in the northwestern part of the U.S. state of Minnesota. The population was 31,192 at the 2020 census. Its county seat is Crookston, and the largest community is East Grand Forks. Polk County is part of the Grand Fo ...

, United States, due south of

Mentor Mentorship is the patronage, influence, guidance, or direction given by a mentor. A mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person. In an organizational setting, a mentor influences the perso ...

and approximately west of Erskine. The lake's name is taken from the extensive

sugar maple ''Acer saccharum'', the sugar maple, is a species of flowering plant in the soapberry and lychee family Sapindaceae. It is native to the hardwood forests of eastern Canada and the eastern United States. Sugar maple is best known for being the ...

forest A forest is an ecosystem characterized by a dense ecological community, community of trees. Hundreds of definitions of forest are used throughout the world, incorporating factors such as tree density, tree height, land use, legal standing, ...

that surrounds it. Even before American settlement of the region, the existence of these extensive hardwood forests in an otherwise treeless open

prairie Prairies are ecosystems considered part of the temperate grasslands, savannas, and shrublands biome by ecologists, based on similar temperate climates, moderate rainfall, and a composition of grasses, herbs, and shrubs, rather than trees, as the ...

gave the lake a geographic identity. Maple Lake is a natural lake and the westernmost significant lake in the

Red River Valley The Red River Valley is a region in central North America that is drained by the Red River of the North; it is part of both Canada and the United States. Forming the border between Minnesota and North Dakota when these territories were admitted ...

of Northwestern Minnesota. It appears on 19th-century maps of the area, and developed as a summer home and resort community as early as 1910. As a result of drought conditions and low inflows during the 1930s, however, the lake nearly dried up. Beginning in 1940 a two-stage

Works Progress Administration The Works Progress Administration (WPA; from 1935 to 1939, then known as the Work Projects Administration from 1939 to 1943) was an American New Deal agency that employed millions of jobseekers (mostly men who were not formally educated) to car ...

development project involving the diversion of water from nearby Badger Lake and the Poplar River raised the lake to its current artificially maintained water level. This rejuvenated the resort industry, and the lake remains a popular summer home, recreational watersports and fishing lake, drawing people from eastern North Dakota and northwestern Minnesota as well as other neighboring states.

References

Sources

*Maple Lake Citizen Monitoring Project Report, 'Maple Lake Assessment Report—1991', available on-line at http://redlakewatershed.org/projects.html. *J. Hoveland, 'Whatever Happened to the Gar Wood? Tales of Life at Hoveland's Haven and the Restoration of Maple Lake' (priv.pub., July 2007).

References

Sources

See also