Cleary Lake Regional Park | A Quiet Lake and a Loud History

Some of the calmest places in Minnesota carry the loudest histories. This paved path slips off a Scott County road, past restored prairie and into shady woods, and circles a quiet lake that was farmland within living memory and Dakota homeland long before that. Welcome to Cleary Lake Regional Park. CHAPTERS 0:00 The Calmest Place, the Loudest History 0:37 Where Are We 1:10 A River of Ice 1:45 The Kettle Lake 2:23 Where Prairie Meets Forest 3:02 Mni Sota Makoce 3:39 The Spirit Lake People 4:19 The Treaties 4:56 Settlers and the Plow 5:34 The Name on the Lake 6:10 From Farm to Park 6:48 The Restored Prairie 7:26 The Loop Around the Water 8:03 The Living Lake 8:41 What the Land Remembers 9:16 Closing Thoughts ABOUT THIS PLACE Cleary Lake Regional Park is a Three Rivers park in Scott County, near Prior Lake, Minnesota, southwest of the Twin Cities. Its lake is a kettle lake, a basin left when a buried block of ice from the retreating Des Moines Lobe melted about fourteen thousand years ago. The land sits where the eastern hardwood forest meets the western tallgrass prairie. This is Dakota homeland, Mni Sota Makoce, and the country of the Mdewakanton, the Spirit Lake people. After the Treaties of Traverse des Sioux and Mendota in 1851, the Dakota were forced from most of this land, Scott County was organized in 1853, and settlers broke the prairie with the plow. The lake carries the name of an early farm family, and the surrounding farmland was assembled into a regional park in the 1970s. Today it is a loop of paved trail around the water, a restored prairie, and a quiet refuge for wildlife, layered with the long memory of the land. Music: licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY). A Fru World Explorer documentary walk. Real places, real history. @fruworldexplorer