If you are looking for a quiet place away from the city, this is the perfect place. Lac qui Parle is located on the Upper Minnesota River in western Minnesota near the South Dakota border. Minneapolis, the nearest major metropolitan area, is 120 miles away.

For all fishers, Lac qui Parle is known as the best walleye fishing place in Western Minnesota because the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources annually stocks the lake with walleye. There is also catfish, bluegill, small mouth bass and northern pike.

Boating, picnic areas, rest rooms, hiking trails and playgrounds are available. There are a total of 19 boat accesses (including canoe portages).
It is also a great place to view wildlife. The Prairie Pot Hole Region is made of many small wetlands which can feed and shelter wildlife all year long. A flock of white pelican, rare to this part of the country, uses it as breeding grounds.

Hunting is also allowed. There are Canadian geese, mallard ducks, ring-necked pheasants, Hungarian partridge and the white-tailed deer in which you are able to hunt. Be sure to check with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for restrictions and regulations regarding public hunting.

Lac qui Parle brochure

Dam Specifications

Lac qui Parle Dam
Length -- 4,100 feet
Height -- 32 feet
Outlet -- 12' to 17' bays -- 4 gated

Marsh Lake Dam
Length -- 11,800 feet
Height -- 19.5 feet
Outlet -- 112' fix crest weir with 2' x 2' gated conduit

Highway 75 Dam
Length -- 16,250 feet
Height -- 23 feet
Outlet -- 65' bascule leaf gate

Chippewa Diversion
Outlet 1 - 8' tainter gate and 4 - 27' fixed crest bays, Low Flow 4' x 4' gated conduit.

Lac qui Parle Dam is the dividing line between Lac qui Parle and Chippewa counties.

The Need for Manpower

The Lac qui Parle flood control project, including the spillway, was a massive project and the construction was labor intensive. While today the choice to use many people for construction may seem inefficient, at the time one of the project’s major goals was to provide jobs and relief from poverty. The Works Progress Administration, or WPA, offered real wages for useful work across the county. This project was so labor intensive that people came from the Twin Cities to increase the number of people working on the project. On average, the WPA employed 1,000 men per month and operated two work camps for their employees near the project site.

Labor Intensive Construction

The group of rocks, called riprap, were hand-placed by the WPA workers. Riprap is a collection of rocks or boulders used to protect embankments, causeways, and dams from erosion caused by water. The rocks include boulders gathered onsite and rock purchased from local quarries. These boulders were split by jackhammers and chisels and then placed into a close-fitting pattern as if interlocking. This is a much more labor-intensive way of installing riprap then dumping it from a truck, but it uses less material overall.

Did you Know?

• Adolf F. Meyer, who designed the Lac qui Parle concrete dam with Sven A. Norling, developed the method still used in Minnesota to determine the ordinary high water mark in lakes and other bodies of water
• WPA was the largest of President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in both funding and scope
  • Over 600,000 Minnesotans were employed by the WPA in the Great Depression
• There were not enough people locally to complete the Lac qui Parle flood control project, so the WPA had to employ hundreds of men from the Twin Cities and housed them in nearby work camps
• WPA employed about 1,000 people in a single month on this project
• This project was controversial and received pushback from the mayors of Minneapolis, St. Paul, and Duluth because they felt that too much WPA money was being sent to rural areas of the state with a smaller population than the cities, with their larger population and greater need for relief

Spillway Timeline
1909-10 - Adolf F. Meyer conducts navigation study on Minnesota River
1919 - Major flood event
1919-20 - Adolf F. Meyer conducts flood study, which lays the groundwork for the LqP flood control project
1934 - Construction of the LqP flood control project begins under the State Emergency Relief Agency, or SERA
1936  - WPA breaks ground on the LqP Dam and Spillway
1937 - Construction of Marsh Lake Dam begins and at the same time the Minnesota Department of Highways and the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad raise roads and railways
1938 - Congress passes the Flood Control Act of 1938, authorizing federal money for the LqP project
1939 - Lac qui Parle and Marsh Lakes are flooded for the first time as construction on major structures is completed
1941 - The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers begins work to improve the LqP flood control project and make it fully functional
1948-51 - The Corps and the Minnesota Department of Conservation (which became the Department of Natural Resources) finish construction of roads and bridges and make final repairs and improvements
1950 - The Corps takes sole responsibility for flood control operations
2019 - In the spring, the area experiences the longest duration of flooding since the spillway was constructed causing significant damage
2020 - The Corps designs and implements new plans to repair the LqP dam and spillway

Lac qui Parle Flood Control Project

Lac qui Parle Dam is one component to the larger Lac qui Parle Flood Control Project, which had four major goals: flood control, water conservation recreation and wildlife propagation and poverty relief. The overall project was built in 1933-1951 at a cost of more than $2.5 million and was the largest flood control project in the state of Minnesota. It involved diverting two rivers, creating two reservoirs, building four dams and weirs, raising two railroads, raising and reinforcing three state highways and many local roads and developing hundreds of acres of park land and thousands of acres of improved wildlife habitat. The federal government paid for labor and most materials while the State of Minnesota acquired the land and paid for most parks and roads.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, St. Paul District  was responsible for the design and construction of the flood control portion of the project from 1941-1951. The St. Paul District participated in planning, approved major designs and inspected the project, but major construction responsibilities was carried out by the Works Progress Administration. The WPA provided labor from 1936-1942, with its most intense period of construction being 1936-1939, at its peak employing 1,400 men. Operation of the project was transferred from the state of Minnesota to St. Paul District in 1950.

Did you Know:

• The project was one of the largest federal relief projects undertaken in the state
• Is the largest flood control project in the state
• Is the largest pre-1970 engineering project on the Minnesota River

National Register of Historic Places

The National Register of Historic Places, authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Today the Lac qui Parle flood control project is eligible to the National Register as a historic district (Lac qui Parle Flood Control Project Historic District), built from 1933-1951. It is eligible for its importance in broad patterns of history in the area of politics and government, engineering and conservation. This historic district is 61.5 miles long and comprises about 25,000 acres.

Lac qui Parle Dam

Lac qui Parle Dam is the dividing line between Lac qui Parle and Chippewa counties. It was constructed in 1936-1941 by the WPA as part of the overall flood control project; however, it is the primary dam of the overall system. The concrete dam was designed by hydraulic engineers Adolph F. Meyer and Sven A. Norling for the Minnesota Department of Conservation’s Division of Drainage and Water, with the St. Paul District providing additional design work in 1941. Excavation for the dam began in 1936. To construct the dam, a huge amount of dirt needed to be brought in to elevate the staging area above the river channel for the cement house and concrete mixers. Before being transferred to the Corps pf Engineers in 1950, the Minnesota Department of Conservation owned and operated the dam. After 1950, the Corps of Engineers constructed new features to the dam to assist with maintenance and operation of the dam including the addition of a gauging station, installing steel plate bulkheads within the bays and repairing the dam apron.