1916 and Spirit Lake’s new Fish Hatchery

By Vance Polton

I thought, today, we would head on up to Dickinson County and back to 1916 and take a look at the new fish hatchery under construction there. It's just about finished and it won't be long before they are in full production mode this spring of 1916.

Although they weren't quite finished last year (1915) they were actually hatching pike. The new hatchery manager Sylvester "Ves" Baur and his assistant Parker Dunham had last spring (1915) cobbled together an eight jar hatchery battery out of old boards they found in the old barn on the State property where the new hatchery was being built. With this makeshift battery they incubated four million pike eggs harvested locally and another eight million they received from the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. Ves was 21 years old when he was hired on February 17, 1915 to run the new Spirit Lake Fish Hatchery. At the time he already had seven years of experience working in fish hatcheries both for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, where his father ran a hatchery, and for the State of Illinois, where he had been put in charge of the spawning of pike and bass. An old newspaper photo of Ves can be seen below.

So let's go take a look at the new hatchery. Attached is a map of the new hatchery as it was planned in 1915. And yes, the dark circular things around the ponds are planted trees, evidently they thought shade was important.  Also attached is a description of the new facilities from the biennial report as well as two newspaper articles from back in the day.  And yes, you read right, the hatchery served double duty not only as a fish hatchery but as a game bird farm also. 

P.S. Pike in the descriptions are walleye not northern pike. That was the common practice until about 1934 when "Pike" slowly became known as "Walleyed Pike" and then by the early 1940's they became commonly known as "Walleye". At least that is what I found was the case in Iowa's biennial reports.