This week in Spirit Lake
About Spirit Lake
Long before any town stood here, the Dakota called the big water to the north the Lake of the Spirit, and French traders carried the name on as Lac d'Esprit. Three brothers-in-law, O.C. Howe, B.F. Parmenter and R.U. Wheelock, laid out a settlement beside the lakes in 1856, and the frontier violence of March 1857 is still remembered at the Abbie Gardner Sharp cabin a few miles south. Spirit Lake became the seat of Dickinson County and incorporated in 1878, and from the 1880s into the 1920s railroads and sportsmen turned the Iowa Great Lakes into a summer getaway, which is why the three-story brick Antlers Hotel, with its wraparound veranda, went up on Hill Avenue in 1902. A decade later the town dedicated its Carnegie library a block away, and both buildings still stand on the National Register. Today about 5,400 people call Spirit Lake home, sitting at the edge of Big Spirit Lake, the largest natural lake in Iowa, where anglers go after walleye and perch by boat in summer and through the ice in winter.