Kaplan Woods State Park Traditional Cache
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Size: 
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No new parks emerged from the 1933 session of legislature, but two years later the system was enlarged by the addition of Kaplan Woods State Park, a 180-acre tract of hardwood forest in Steele County, in south-central Minnesota. Located on the south edge of Owatonna, the area included a stretch of the Straight River and several tributary streams, which made for rather varied topography in a landscape otherwise characterized mainly by level prairies. The Kaplan family, prominent in the city's business life, had owned and preserved the woods, which had received some local recreational use. The legislature now appropriated $16,000 for the purchase of the tract. Despite the unsatisfactory results such provisions had produced in the cases of Sibley and Lake Bemidji state parks, the act contained the condition that the park should be forever maintained by Steele County,"and no request for additional funds from the state shall be made."
As might have been predicted, the county offered no financial aid for the development of the parks during the depression years, and Kaplan Woods remained undeveloped for several years. By the time of the parks director's fifth biennial report in 1940, however, the state had put in a well and some picnic tables and had laid out trails through the woods. A parking area, latrines, expansion of the picnic area, and reforestation were on the docket for future action. Most of these projects were carried out, but that is as far as development of the park ever went. In 1946 retiring parks director Lathrop wrote his successor that it was used mainly for picnicking, though now and then someone camped there.
Kaplan Woods remained part of the state par system for less than thirty years. Besides its proximity to Owatonna, which gave it some of the characteristics of a city park, its integrity was impaired by the construction of a four-lane highway designed to bypass Owatonna on the south. In 1963 Kaplan Woods was, by act of legislature, transferred to the city. Although it was not truly of state park quality, it is unfortunate that Kaplan Woods could not in some way have been protected by a state agency. Today it is a good example of a wooded area, on the edge of a city, that is essentially unprotected. Although it no longer has picnic facilities, it is heavily used by local people, and there has been a proliferation of trails that have largely spoiled the semiwilderness quality of the area.
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Qragher pnfr?
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