In 1998 the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources published a fourteen page pamphlet on the history of the Lamprey Pass Management Area located near Forest Lake, Minnesota. It was written by Marie Jones with contributions from Ted J. Houle, Carrol Henderson and Mary Ann Hoyt. It is posted here with the permission of the DNR.
The story told by Ms. Jones and her colleagues begins with Uri Locke Lamprey, a successful St. Paul lawyer, real estate investor, philanthropist and conservationist, who built a Hunt Club on a "pass" between Howard and Mud Lakes in the 1880s and 1890s. "The Lamprey Pass," Ms. Jones writes, "is considered the birthplace of wildlife conservation in Minnesota."
The saga of the Lamprey Pass continued long after his death in 1906 at age sixty-four. For years the question of whether the area, which contained a rare great blue heron rookery, should be developed or preserved was debated by local residents and officials. That debate ended on November 18, 1981, when "roughly 100 years after Uri Lamprey acquired the land himself, the DNR purchased the Lamprey farm."
For more about the "Father of the State's Game Laws," see "Uri Locke Lamprey (1842-1906)" (MLHP, 2019), which is a collection of obituaries, a bar memorial and Minnesota Supreme Court cases in which he was a party.
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