Shaping the River

Above Hastings, the natural river was treacherous for steamboats, with depths reaching only three and one-half feet in some places. The federal government first tried to improve navigation with wing dams made of rock and brush to direct the river's flow and with closing dams that constricted alternate water channels to scour a deeper river bottom. In the late 1920s, the federal government began constructing a system of locks and dams along the Mississippi to create a nine-foot navigable channel. Because wing dams posed a danger to boats, navigation lamps were lit on the wing dam buoys, and members of the Bloomstrand family performed that work for 39 years. John Edward Bloomstrand began lighting the buoys in 1895, and his wife, Hedda Daniel Bloomstrand, and their children, Walt Bloomstrand and Lillian Bloomstrand Wilson, also held the job until 1934. The United States Army Corps of Engineers completed Lock and Dam #2 just upstream of Hastings in 1930 as the second in a system of 29 locks and dams on the Mississippi River between Minneapolis and St. Louis. By the mid 1940s, the lock's walls, more than 600 feet long, had settled and tilted, and a second lock was built in 1948 to replace the original. The City of Hastings now has a power plant on the dam that generates electricity by water flow.

Hastings, Minnesota · United States