Spring Park, Minnesota

Cooks Bay, in Mound, Minnesota, is one of many bays that make up Lake Minnetonka. Its area is about 550 acres (223 ha). It is west of Island Park, and east of Mound's Highlands neighborhood. Between the 1870s until the 1920s, Cooks Bay was known for its family hotels including Chapman House, Bartlett Place, Buena Vista Hotel, Hotel Kern, Hotel Dewey, and the Sunset Villa. Surfside Park, on the north shore of Cook's Bay, was once the home of Surfside Casino, a popular destination that began as the Chapman Boathouse in the 1870s. Today, Cook's Bay has a public boat launch located at the park, and the old Mound Depot relocated in 1967. For more about the Westonka area, visit westonkahistoricalsociety.org and the museum at 5341 Maywood Rd., Mound MN, open Saturdays, 10-2.

The Thompson Summer House is a house in Minnetonka Beach, Minnesota, United States, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is located on Hennepin County Road 15, across from Lafayette Bay on Lake Minnetonka. The house was built in 1887 for Charles Telford Thompson, an attorney and civil leader, and his wife. It was listed on the National Register as a typical example of the types of Queen Anne summer homes that middle and upper-class Minneapolis residents owned on Lake Minnetonka during the end of the 19th century. An identical house owned by Samuel A. Harris, Charles Thompson's brother-in-law, once sat adjacent to the Thompson Summer House, but was demolished in 1968. In the 1990s, the house faced deterioration from erosion and rot. In an effort to stabilize the foundation and rebuild the wraparound porch while preserving the character of the house, the owners undertook a major restoration project. The project, conducted by Wes Foss, the husband of Thompson's great-great-granddaughter Debbie, was featured on a three-part episode of Hometime on PBS and won an award from the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota in 2005.The house is currently one of the oldest extant summer houses on Lake Minnetonka and is in excellent condition. It is still used strictly as a summer home (as it has always been) and frequently hosts family gatherings.

Mound is a city in western Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 9,052 at the 2010 census. Mound was the birthplace of the Tonka truck that is named after Lake Minnetonka, which the eastern part of town sits on. Mound is 22 miles (35 km) west of Minneapolis, the county seat.

Langdon Bay Creek is a creek in Mound, Minnesota, United States. It is the outflow for, and connects, Lake Langdon (or Bay) to Mound's Lost Lake, which is part of Lake Minnetonka. Its length is perhaps 200 feet (61 m) long and it runs west to east. It is unnavigable and passes under Commerce Boulevard through a culvert. It has also been known as Sollie's Creek, named after the uncles of the Andrews Sisters who owned a grocery store to the south of it. Its part of the Langdon Lake subwatershed of the Minnehaha Creek Watershed District (MCWD), with the drainage from about 1,055 acres (4.27 km2) running through it. Other lakes in the subwatershed whose outflows eventually pass through it are Saunders Lake, Black Lake, and Mound's old sewer plant holding pond.

Lake Langdon in Mound, Minnesota, has an area of 144 acres (0.6 km2). Minnehaha Creek Watershed District (MCWD) charts show its maximum depth of 38 feet (12 m), though it would be classified as a shallow lake with a mean depth of 8.3 feet (2.5 m). It is named for R. V. Langdon, the first township clerk. It is located west of Commerce Boulevard and south of Lynwood Boulevard. Boats on the lake cannot navigate to the nearby Lake Minnetonka, though it overflows into Lost Lake, part of the Big Lake, through Langdon Bay Creek. It also serves as an outlet for Saunders Lake, to its west. The lake has a watershed area to surface area ratio of 6.5:1, meaning that it drains an area about 6½ times its size. The lake (or bay as it is sometimes called) has an over abundance of phosphorus, that probably resulted from it being downstream from Mound's old sewer plant. The plant closed back in the late 1970s. Phosphorus is a catalyst that can contribute to excessive plant growth. Though the lake's MCWD Report Card shows a significant drop off of the phosphorus levels over the past 20 years, it is still a problem. A higher outflow from Langdon could lower the phosphorus level, but its water clarity remains poor, despite the fact that it was treated with Alum in 1998.

Orono ( ORR-ə-noh, ORR-noh) is a city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States west of Minneapolis. Located on the north shore of Lake Minnetonka, Orono is one of the city’s most upscale and wealthiest neighborhoods and also known for its sparse suburban character and abundant wildlife.The population was 7,437 at the 2010 census. Orono is in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul metropolitan area.

The Crane Island Historic District is a historic district of vacation properties on Crane Island in Lake Minnetonka, part of the city of Minnetrista, Minnesota, United States. It consists of a number of private residential summer cottages and some communal amenities. Although it was originally developed by parishioners of the Presbyterian Church, it is now a secular association that welcomes all. The island was designated a historic district and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.Lake Minnetonka had been a popular recreation area after the American Civil War, drawing vacationers from the eastern and southern United States and later from Minneapolis as it grew. Crane Island had escaped development because it had been a heron rookery. A storm in 1906 blew down most of the trees from the center of the island. The herons moved to the nearby Wawatasso Island. Charles E. Woodward had been spending his summer vacation in the nearby town of Mound, and he explored the island after the storm out of curiosity. He figured the land would be ideal for cottages, so he organized a group from Bethlehem Presbyterian Church and formed the Crane Island Association.The association bought the island and surveyed a number of lots for development. The association established a commons area in the center of the island with a caretaker's lodge, an icehouse, and a tennis court. The commons area was modeled on the kind of commons in New England, where all neighbors would use common grazing land. Owners of the cottages could take the Great Northern Railway to the depots at Mound or Spring Park and then charter a private boat to the island. The yellow streetcar boats of Twin City Rapid Transit also made two daily stops at the island between mid-May and September.Writer Marjorie Myers Douglas spent summers on the island from 1917, when she was five years old, until she had finished college. Her book Barefoot on Crane Island chronicles many of her personal experiences with summers she spent on the island.

Tonka Bay is a city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States. It is located on Lake Minnetonka between the upper and lower lakes. It gained some popularity in the 1880s and 1890s as a summer lake resort. The population of Tonka Bay was 1,475 at the 2010 census.

Dutch Lake is a lake located in the state of Minnesota. It was named for its early German population. It is a 159.50 acres (64.5474 ha) acre lake that is west-southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul in the Minneapolis suburb of Mound and Minnetrista. It has an average depth of 15.15 feet (4.62 m) and a maximum depth of 45 ft (14 m). Slow Creek, its un-navigable outflow is on its northeast shore. It connects the lake to Lake Minnetonka. It is home to a variety of fish including Black, Yellow, and Brown Bullhead, Black Crappie, Bluegill, Hybrid Sunfish, Largemouth Bass, Northern Pike, Pumpkinseed Sunfish, and Yellow Perch. Much of the Northern shore is owned by Camp Christmas Tree summer day camp.

Peter Gideon (1820–1899) was a farmer near Excelsior, Minnesota, United States, who was responsible for breeding apples that could withstand Minnesota's climate. Gideon's farmhouse, now within the boundaries of Shorewood, Minnesota, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Gideon moved to Minnesota in 1853, near Lake Minnetonka, and experimented with planting pear, plum, cherry, peach, and apple seeds. After ten years of experimentation, the harsh Minnesota winters had killed off all of his trees except for one seedling crab apple tree. Seeking advice from a well-known expert in the field, he started corresponding with apple expert Francis Peabody Sharp in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada who had employed new, successful methods of hybridization starting back in 1844 (see more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Peabody_Sharp). Sharp instructed him on the proper methods for hybridizing apples and buying seeds for colder climates, specifically indicating Bangor, Maine as the place to buy the seeds (Bangor, ME is located directly over the border from Woodstock, Canada). Gideon never told anybody about corresponding with Sharp nor gave him any credit for his expert advice. Gideon, being a transcendentalist, just said "an invisible being" came to him in a dream and told him to get some Russian seeds from a company in Bangor, Maine. There is, however, written evidence of Sharp and Gideon corresponding about these matters. Therefore, thanks to the expert advice of Francis Peabody Sharp, he sent back to Bangor, Maine for seeds and scions, and continued his experiments by grafting a scion onto the crab apple tree. From this experiment, in 1868 he successfully selected a variety of apple that he named the "Wealthy", in honor of his wife. In March 1878, Minnesota established a State Experimental Fruit Farm by act of the Legislature which Gideon ran for eleven years, planting many thousands of apple trees and distributing his best seeds across the state. He had been experimenting unsuccessfully with breeding apples for the colder Minnesota climate. This is what led him to seek out the expertise and advice of Francis Peabody Sharp's on how to grow his fruits in Minnesota, using Russian seeds and using new Sharp's new techniques of hybridization. [1] The state farm was located near Gideon's land on Lake Minnetonka, under the jurisdiction of the University of Minnesota. When the farm closed in February 1889 due to conflicts with the University, Gideon lost his job. Gideon later became the first superintendent of a University of Minnesota agricultural experiment station established in 1878. The station was abandoned in 1889, when he retired, but in 1907 the Minnesota Legislature established a fruit breeding farm between Excelsior and Chaska. The fruit breeding farm later became the Horticultural Research Center, which is now part of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. The center later developed the Haralson apple, introduced in 1922. The Wealthy apple is genetically related to the Haralson, though it took DNA testing to rediscover this fact after extensive hybridization.

Minnesota, more so than any other state, is the focal point for ice hockey in the United States. Since the late-19th century, the cold, winter weather enabled the land of 10,000 lakes to be a natural home for ice hockey and the residents of the state have invested more time, effort and energy into the game than most other regions in the world.

Shorewood is a city nestled in the woods along on the shores of Lake Minnetonka in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States. The population was 7,307 at the 2010 census. The city was incorporated in 1956. Its area was originally part of the former Excelsior Township. State Highway 7 serves as a main route.