City of Winona’s Prairie Island Park:

Part I: Stories of the Land 1864 - 1916

The Winona County Land plat of 1894 reveals that the space named Prairie Island is actually the island across Straight Slough from what is currently known as Prairie Island Park.  The lots were owned in 1896 by familiar names such as Lamberton, Laird, Norton, and Youman, and tended to be covered with cottonwood, large white oak, elm, and ash trees of the floodplain forests.  At least half of what was referred to as Prairie Island extended 4-1/2 miles upstream from the existing US Lock and Dam No. 5A, built in 1935, and is now under water as the Polander and Twin Lakes area.

European immigrants began moving into the Winona area en masse in 1851, even though the Treaty of 1851 had not yet been ratified between the Dakota and the State of Minnesota.   In spite of the forced removal of the Dakota around 1863, in 1871-73 there was at least one known settlement, on Prairie Island nearer to Minnesota City, of Ho-Chunk and possibly Dakota that had resisted exile to the Santee Sioux Reservation in Nebraska, (Winona Daily Republican).  

Mentions in the Winona Daily Republican, beginning in 1868, alluded to the fact that the area of present day Prairie Island Park was farmed for wheat by A. J. Cornell in 1879, and produce by other farmers, as well as grazing cattle by C. J. Cummings around 1869. In 1896, an additional survey of the land was made to meet the demand for garden farming plots as Prairie Island was noted as “one of the first places to dry out in the spring and is a very desirable property for growing vegetables” (Winona Daily Republican, 1896).  Around 1886, snippets emerged in the Winona Daily Republican featuring groups from Winona adventuring to Prairie Island in skiffs “to spend a week or ten days in tent life”, fish, hunt, play baseball, shoot trap, and sit around a campfire.  In 1900, a camp of about forty-clam hunters and their families harvested eight-tons of clams from an area around Prairie Island for the manufacturing of buttons made out of shells (Winona Daily Republican, 1900).  

John A. Latsch, a wealthy grocer from Winona, purchased over 7,000 acres of Mississippi River shoreline between Homer and Lock & Dam 5 near Minneiska.  Latsch had often been observed canoeing by himself through the backwaters of the Mississippi whenever he had time away from running the grocery business.  According to the legend, a storm blew in and Latsch tried to seek protection on some farmland near Minneiska.  The farmer greeted him with a shotgun and forced him back on the water in the storm. 

An aging riverboat Captain Frank J. Fugina recalls, in his 1953 Winona Republican column “Ol’ Man River”, when Latsch revealed his plan for the Riverside Park Preserve and requested his assistance in acquiring land to create “a vast recreation area where the boys and girls could skate, swim, camp, and picnic unmolested and where wildlife would be protected, and where the timber would be given a chance to grow up, spared from the woodsman’s saw and ax and provide a paradise for the generations to come.”  Fugina states that the Prairie Island area was the “nucleus for his plan.” Latsch ultimately donated thousands of acres of land to the states of Minnesota and Wisconsin for public parks.  In Winona, he purchased and deeded land in 1916 that is two-times the acreage of Winona to the City for the Riverside Park Preserve, city parks, and Woodlawn Cemetery.  

Researched and written by Anne Conway. Printed in The Argus, Volume 24, No.2, 2023.