History

Below is a snapshot of the history of Governor Dodge State Park. For a more detailed human history of the park and surrounding area, please see:  Governor Dodge State Park Culture History.

Introduction

Governor Dodge State Park is situated at the headwaters of Mill Creek – a deep, narrow valley that descends from a geologic escarpment along the north edge of the Military Ridge to the Lower Wisconsin River. While local history is documented in written accounts about early white settler activities, Indigenous people have lived on this landscape for at least 13,000 years. Their history is recounted in oral traditions of descendant people like the Ho-Chunk and revealed through archaeological research.

Indigenous People

Indigenous people traversed this landscape walking along ridgetop trails and canoeing the rivers. The Mississippi River might be compared to a modern superhighway with summer villages linked through the human interactions like trade and exchange of ideas. The Wisconsin River is like a major state highway, providing key routes to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes. Tributary branches to the Wisconsin River, like Mill Creek, are likened to county and town roads. They allow access to interior settings full of plant and animal resources that could sustain smaller groups in seasonal camps connected by upland trail systems.

Shortly after the glaciers retreated, humans moved into the area that is now Governor Dodge State Park. Just as the park’s scenic hills and valleys provide refuge from over-crowded cities, they once provided shelter from snow and cold to the area’s first human inhabitants.

More than 8,000 years ago, men and women made winter camps at the base of rock overhangs enjoying the protection of the sandstone walls. As the weather warmed, they moved into more open areas of what is now Wisconsin and Illinois to hunt bison and other game. Archaeological digs within the park verify the existence of human habitation.

Miners

Large seams of lead ore lay near the earth’s surface throughout the region south of the Wisconsin River. Miners from Europe began arriving in the 1820s. One of the first finds was at Jenkins Branch, which lays in Cox Hollow, just south of the present park boundary.

As more and more miners arrived, conflicts broke out between the Europeans and the Ho-Chunk, who had originally worked the mines. These tensions would contribute to the Black Hawk War of 1832. 

Relatively small-scale lead mining continued in the region until just after Wisconsin became a state in 1848. The next year, the discovery of gold in California sparked the famed “Rush” that enticed many “Badger” miners to leave Wisconsin.

Farmers

The next wave of settlers came to farm the land. The ridges in the Driftless Area once supported vast, sweeping prairies. Those treeless areas were more easily plowed than surrounding woodlands and contained rich, black soil—prime land for agriculture. Norwegian, Swiss and immigrants from other European countries settled the area as farmers and cheesemakers.

Family farms like the Stephens, Griffiths and Pengelly's filtered into the park area in the mid and late-1800s. Throughout the years, their farmsteads were handed down from one generation to the next, or sold to newly arriving immigrants.

The State Park

In 1948, Iowa County presented one of these farmsteads—the Henry Larson estate—to the state of Wisconsin. These first 160 acres provided the nucleus for what was to become Governor Dodge State Park. Ten years later an earthen dam was constructed across Mill Creek and Cox Hollow Lake was created.  

As years passed, the state purchased neighboring farms. A second earthen dam was built in 1966, forming Twin Valley Lake. Beaches, campgrounds, bathhouses, trails, shelters and other facilities were constructed throughout the years.

Traces of the area's human history remain in the stone arrowheads, crumbling rock foundations and rusted barbed wire that is still found throughout the park—traces that every year become harder to find as the land struggles to restore itself to the wild, natural area it once was.