Minnehaha Falls

Minnehaha Falls drops 53 feet into a gorge at the heart of Minnehaha Regional Park in south Minneapolis, carrying the flow of Minnehaha Creek toward the Mississippi River. The park around it was established in 1889 and remains one of the most visited in the Minneapolis Park System.

The falls drew attention long before the park was formally created. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1855 poem "The Song of Hiawatha" took the falls as a central image, spreading their reputation well beyond Minnesota, though Longfellow himself never visited and worked from daguerreotypes and written accounts.

The creek that feeds the falls is rain-dependent, and its volume can change markedly after heavy rainfall, swelling the cascade and altering the character of the gorge below. At lower flows, the pool at the base is calm enough to attract anglers.

This set is part of an ongoing series documenting Minneapolis places across time. Returns to Minnehaha Falls at different points record the same landmark under different conditions, building a longer account of a place that has stayed largely unchanged in form while the city around it has not.