Boasting six lakes, Missouri’s largest natural sand beach, a rare sand prairie, and a series of hiking and biking trails, Wakonda State Park is a popular attraction for boating enthusiasts, birders, campers, and other nature lovers.
Photo courtesy of Scott Myers
What a paradox that in the twentieth century, in an industry-fueled search for gravels, Missourians accidentally created an aquatic playground. Through an unlikely series of events beginning with glaciation during the Pleistocene Epoch and involving intensive human manipulation of the landscape, Wakonda State Park has become one of the state’s most enticing recreational parks as well as a refuge for one of its most endangered natural communities: the sand prairie.
The landscape near Wakonda in northeast Missouri was shaped by the southward thrust of massive ice sheets and then by their last retreat when the big thaw set in. The retreat of the glaciers and the melt that ensued caused the Mississippi to carve a broad floodplain along which large, concentrated deposits of gravel and sand that had been carried along by the glacier were left behind. These deposits then lay unremarked until Missourians found a widespread need for them.
After World War I, the increasing popularity of the automobile dictated a rapid improvement in Missouri’s roads. A new State Highway Commission set a major mission: “To lift Missouri out of the mud!” The obvious and practical method was to gravel the roads. The search was on for materials, and soon some alert road builder discovered the extensive and easily mined deposits near LaGrange. They turned out to be the best and largest source of road-surfacing material in the state, with about sixteen million tons of gravel shipped from the site between 1930 and 1965.
As a reminder of the deposits’ Pleistocene origins, a mastodon tusk and other fossils of the epoch were excavated in the gravel operations. Another indication of their origins was the Lake Superior agate, which demonstrates how far the glacier carried its collection. This and other stones of various colors gave LaGrange gravel its lithological beauty, a beauty that lives on today. Visitors enjoy searching for interesting geological specimens, but removal of rocks from state parks is prohibited.
Years of dredging scooped out the gravel to deep levels, below the water table in the floodplain, creating lakes. They are clean little lakes because the river water that fills them was filtered through the glacial deposits. The new water bodies soon became popular for fishing and swimming, suggesting to Lewis and Marion county residents a perfect location for a park. The idea grew, and on June 5, 1960, the Highway Commission deeded 257 acres on which it had exhausted the gravel deposits to a receptive State Park Board.
Park officials invited suggestions for a name for the new park. Dr. Carl Chapman, a noted archaeologist at the University of Missouri, suggested Wakonda, derived from an Osage and Missouria word meaning “something consecrated.” A river north of the site is named Wyaconda.
Development was slow at first. Not until September 1967 was a contract let for construction of a combination bathhouse and concession. Wakonda boasts the largest natural sand beach of any state park—at least, the sand is natural. It was put there by the glacier and the Mississippi and left behind after decades of gravel excavation. The beach is large enough for swimmers, volleyball, and other activities. As overburden was removed from the gravel beds, it was shoved to the sides of the excavation where it now forms embankments above the open water. Although the landscape is man-made, the well-watered silty soil promotes rapid tree growth, and visitors can enjoy walking and camping in an attractive, largely cottonwood forest that may be younger than themselves.
In 1991 the State Highways and Transportation Commission transferred an additional 740 acres to the state park, including about 220 acres of lakes and ponds created by more recent gravel and sand excavations. The expanse of Wakonda State Park was nearly quadrupled, its lake area enlarged proportionately.
Photo courtesy of Missouri State Park
There are now six lakes, and you may rent a johnboat or kayak on several of them. There are also two campgrounds and numerous picnic sites. Since the lakes are inundated during extreme Mississippi River flooding, they contain many different species of fish. Most anglers target largemouth bass, crappie, bluegill, and catfish, but other species may be taken including muskie, spoonbill, walleye, and northern pike. Attracting thousands of waterfowl during spring and fall migrations, Wakonda is also a destination on Missouri’s portion of the Great River Birding Trail.
Most intriguing, however, is a 100-acre area of seemingly naturally sculpted sand mounds, which mimic the soil conditions found on now rare natural sand prairies. On these mounds, amazingly, a number of sand-loving prairie and sandbar species have found refuge. Sand grass, sand dropseed, winged pigweed, and an endangered umbrella sedge (Cypeius schweinitzii) blanket the undulating sandy mounds, as do the yellow-flowered evening primrose and the prairie sunflower.
Sand prairies were once fairly common on the more stable sandy terraces along the Mississippi, Missouri, and other large rivers. But channelization since the 1920s and conversion of river margins to agricultural land relentlessly eliminated them. By 1949 when Julian Steyermark was making collections for his monumental Flora of Missouri, sand prairies and some of their characteristic plants were virtually extinct—except for one small remnant he discovered and described on the lower Des Moines River. Now it turned out that the spoil piles of the LaGrange gravel operations, quite by accident, had created another refuge for some of these species.
How did it happen? Highway department maps carefully marked as to dates of mining reveal that the prairie established itself on spoil piles created very early in the operations—back in the 1920s, when natural sand prairies that could provide a source for windblown seed still existed on nearby Mississippi River terraces. Just as the last of the natural prairies were destroyed, victims of improvements for barge navigation, the artificial environment in the park was being created. Thus at a most singular moment in time, a window of opportunity opened, and seed from the last of the natural sand prairies took root in a new, artificial environment, one that mimicked precisely the growing conditions necessary for the survival of the sand prairie species. The man-made piles of Wakonda, protected from further disturbance for more than eighty years, became the unheralded savior for a unique, vanishing natural community.
As it turns out, Steyermark’s tiny sand prairie on the lower Des Moines River also still exists, having been carefully protected over the years by a family who regarded it as something special. The family agreed to let park naturalists maintain the site and use it as a source of seed for re-establishing yet other species that did not manage to make it on their own to Wakonda. More recently, naturalists discovered some remnants of sand prairie at the newly acquired Iliniwek Village State Historic Site near the junction of the Des Moines and Mississippi Rivers, not far from Steyermark’s site, and are working also to restore those.
Mississippi River floods periodically take a toll on the visitor facilities at Wakonda, but the park continues to attract more than 100,000 visitors a year. In addition to swimming, fishing, birding, and boating, the park offers more than seven miles of hiking and biking trails. Several wind along the lakes and through the sand prairies, where those so inclined can marvel at the natural survivors of a most unnatural history.
WAKONDA STATE PARK • 32836 STATE PARK ROAD, LA GRANGE
Featured image courtesy of Missouri State Parks.
