In 1891, government surveyors platted this area as meadows, but travel was difficult until drainage ditch spoil piles provided a rough bed for the first road, present-day Highway 72, and a road linking Baudette and Kelliher was completed in 1914. Ludlow had a post office by 1915, and homesteaders worked hard to eke out a living, including early residents William and Gerry Ganyo, who helped raise elk and caribou, though like many other settlers they did not stay long. When the bog could not be properly drained for farming, many settlers moved on or government resettlement programs helped them relocate to more productive lands. Ludlow Island is a spit of high ground emerging from a sea of peat, a gravel ridge that was once a sand ridge in ancient Glacial Lake Agassiz. For centuries, North American native peoples ventured into the bog to hunt and trap game and to harvest plants and berries, using bog plants for food and medicines and to make baskets, mats, dwellings, and canoes. The bog remains important to the nearby Red Lake Band of Ojibwe. In 1939, a resettlement camp bunkhouse housed workers including second cook Frank Dickerson and night watchman James Cavanaugh, and the camp crew worked on dams and firebreaks in the bog. A fire patron station and tower stood here in 1927, and by 1939 game patrollers used cabins on their rounds, especially in winter when they traveled by snowshoe or dogsled. Ludlow Island was also the site of an unsuccessful attempt to save Minnesota's last woodland caribou band from extinction; they vanished from the state in the 1940s.