Zumbro River, South Branch

About

George Head Settles Rochester, 1854 — Zumbro River Valley. The river reached written record before it reached settlers. Major Stephen Long first explored it in 1817 and found it already known by the name French traders had given it: the Rivière des Embarras, the River of Difficulties. The label stuck to a stream that would, within four decades, become the seedbed of one of Minnesota's largest cities.

That settlement began with a claim. On July 12, 1854, George Head and his family staked ground on the South Fork of the Zumbro River in what is now downtown Rochester, and built Head's Tavern — the first structure in the future city. Head named the place for his hometown of Rochester, New York, and the settlement was incorporated as a city in 1858. The South Fork, a 65-mile tributary of the Zumbro, sat at the center of that early growth. The Zumbro itself takes its name from the Zumbro people, a Dakota band, and lends that name to the Zumbro River State Water Trail.

Water kept drawing settlers to the banks. In 1855 the Tibbetts brothers staked the ground that became Zumbro Falls, building homes on opposite banks to run a ferry where travelers had once forded the stream. The crossing that gave the community its start was a practical answer to the same difficulty the French traders had named decades earlier.

The watershed's next century belonged to industry. The Zumbro's forests were logged from the 1830s through the 1920s, feeding regional timber operations through local sawmills and logging drives. Early hydrological study followed the same arc: USGS surveys and gauging stations reaching back into the late nineteenth century built the first comprehensive record of the river's flow, and mid-twentieth-century water-pollution studies and later Clean Water Act assessments addressed more than a hundred years of logging, agricultural, and industrial impact. Since 2010 the Minnesota DNR, working with local watershed partnerships, has pursued streambank stabilization, native fish restocking, and nutrient-reduction work across the basin.

Today the river winds through a diverse array of natural communities framed by its bluffs, and that scenery anchors the Zumbro River State Water Trail. On the North Fork, paddlers reach the water at Covered Bridge Park and Collins Park. The main-stem Zumbro drains a watershed of some 1,400 square miles across southeastern Minnesota before joining the Mississippi River near Reads Landing — the far end of a system whose South Branch once carried the first chapter of Rochester's story.