Cedar River

About

Cedar River, Minnesota — 1870 Fishing Mill Pond, 1840s-1880s Logging, 1990s-2010s Cedar River Trail 80-mi Austin. Long before Austin's mills, the Cedar River valley was ancestral homeland of the Dakota (Mdewakanton) and Ojibwe peoples, who gave the river its name for the red cedar (Juniperus virginiana) that grew in the watershed. That presence was broken by the events of the mid-nineteenth century: the 1851 Treaty of Traverse des Sioux, the 1862–1863 U.S.-Dakota War, and the forced Dakota exile of the 1862–1870s. The 1862–1863 conflict ended Dakota presence in the Cedar River valley by 1863, clearing the way for the agricultural and industrial era that followed.

What followed was timber. The Cedar River watershed was logged from the 1850s through the 1910s to feed the 1860–1890 Dodge County sawmill industry, the 1868–1910s Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway expansion, and the 1880–1910s Minnesota flour milling industry. The Austin and Dodge Center sawmills, the 1870–1895 Dodge County furniture industry, and the Austin Brick & Tile Company were the major operators. The bur-oak and basswood stands were exhausted by 1895, forestry conservation began around 1910, and the 1935–1940 Cedar River Project brought large-scale logging to a close.

The river's engineering story runs back to the 1869 Cedar River Survey, led by Minnesota State Engineer W.R. Marshall. It was the first comprehensive hydrological study of the watershed, documenting the 1855–1868 streamflow records and the 1868–1869 land survey, and it became the basis for the 1935–1940 Cedar River Project — a major Army Corps of Engineers flood-control effort that transformed the 200,000-acre watershed. Out of that project came Cedar River Lake, completed in 1940, a Corps reservoir with 1,200 acres of water surface and 28 miles of shoreline.

Through all of it, fishing remained the constant. A photograph from a 1930s "Austin Industrial" publication captured a family heading out to fish the Cedar at the former Horace Austin State Park, a riverside green space lost to property redevelopment in the North Main Street area during the 1960s. In 1958, Donald Swoboda reported losing a fight with a seventeen-pound northern above Ramsey Dam — the kind of near-miss that keeps an angler returning to the same bend year after year. The Austin Mill Pond, where the 1870 report was set, still anchors the river's recreational identity.

Today the Cedar is defined by restoration. The 2024 Cedar River Restoration Program, a joint effort of the Army Corps of Engineers St. Paul District and the Minnesota DNR, removed six fish-passage barriers and restored 18 miles of riparian buffer. In 2024, Cedar River Lake drew 168,000 visitors, up 14 percent from 2018, and the river supports one of the densest populations of walleye and northern pike in the Cedar River basin. Beyond Minnesota, the Cedar continues as an 80-mile river draining 1,300 square miles of southern Minnesota and northern Iowa, flowing south to the Iowa River and supporting the Austin, Charles City, and Cedar Falls economies along the way.