A continental divide near Dane Prairie separates runoff flowing west into the Otter Tail River, the Red River, Winnipeg, and Hudson Bay from water flowing east into the Pomme de Terre River, the Minnesota River, the Mississippi River, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Dane Prairie Township was organized by the Otter Tail County Commissioners on May 10, 1870, after a petition signed mostly by natives of Denmark, and its first meetings were held in private homes until a town hall was built in 1892. The township's organizational meeting took place in the home of early settler Niels Thygesen, who had served in the Danish military in the war with Germany in 1864-1865, then came to Otter Tail County in 1865 with an ox team and covered wagon and homesteaded Section 11. Dane Prairie Township contains 75 lakes, more than any other township in the county, including Wall and Swan lakes. The area's rural architecture reflects its agricultural history, with early log barns for oxen and horses, later gabled and arched-roof barns for livestock and hay, round barns that became popular in the 1920's, silos for storing fermented chopped corn, and windmills that pumped water until electricity reached farms in the late 1930s and 1940s.