Robert Wolterstorff was a Washington County dairy farmer and a charter member of the Woodbury Village Council.
Wolterstorff saw his community change from a rich farming area into a sprawling suburb.
Now, 11 years after his death, family members want to honor his legacy by giving his name to a lake on land he farmed. Wolterstorff died in 2007 at age 86.
“We just thought: it’s a lake; it should be named,” said David Wolterstorff, 67, one of Robert Wolterstorff’s three children. “It’s the only significant piece of water in the area. Why not name it something and create something nice for the city?”
Family members will be asking the Washington County Board on Tuesday to approve calling the unnamed 20-acre body of water “Lake Robert.”
The lake is southwest of Military Road and Jamaica Avenue in Cottage Grove, just south of the Woodbury border.
“My dad loved this land,” David Wolterstorff said during a tour of the lake Wednesday. “He loved the serenity of it. The lake was an important part of that. Hundreds of geese and ducks pass through here every year.”
Robert Wolterstorff’s German ancestors settled nearby in 1852, and he grew up helping his father and nine siblings milk the cows and do other farm chores.
Robert Wolterstorff went to high school at the University of Minnesota School of Agriculture in St. Paul.
After serving in World War II, he went into the dairy-farming business with his father-in-law and brother-in-law, George and Ralph McHattie. Together, they ran the 80-acre farm for more than 30 years.
Wolterstorff and his wife, Emily, 94, whose great-grandfather Alexander McHattie was one of Woodbury’s first settlers, raised three children on the land.
“We had 60 dairy cows, and they had to be milked twice a day, every day, unfortunately,” said David Wolterstorff, an architect. “The cows want to be milked at 5 o’clock in the morning and then again at 4 o’clock at night. They have to be. There is no such thing as vacations or holidays.”
WHEN HE SERVED
In 1967, Woodbury Township voters approved village incorporation and chose a mayor-council form of government.
Robert Wolterstorff’s best childhood friend, Orville Bielenberg, was running for mayor and persuaded him to run for the council. They both won.
Wolterstorff served as the council’s rural representative. “He made sure the farmers were treated fairly and that they were heard,” Emily Wolterstorff told the Pioneer Press in 2007.
He was re-elected in 1970 and 1974.
“Dad was a wonderful guy,” David Wolterstorff said. “He was very patient with everybody. He worked hard his whole life, and he never complained about anything. He was always helping people. He always wanted what was best for the community.”
The lake is just east of land owned by the Dodge Nature Center. It’s surrounded by mature trees, farmland, Jamaica Avenue and the Michael’s Point single-family housing development. The David Wolterstorff family developed Michael’s Point; daughter Erin Ecker and her family live on the lake, and son Michael Wolterstorff and his family live across the street.
HOW DO YOU NAME A LAKE?
Naming a lake or other geographic feature in Minnesota can take some time.
Here’s how the process works: At least 15 registered voters in the county where the feature is located must petition that county’s board of commissioners. A public hearing is held, and the county board must vote to approve it.
The hearing will be held Tuesday morning at the Washington County Government Center in Stillwater.
At that hearing, the board will also consider a competing petition, presented to county employees on Friday, asking that the lake be named Shephards Lake. Cottage Grove resident and local historian Beverly Gross, who organized the petition, said it’s always been called that, after the Shephard family that owned a nearby farm.
If the county board supports a name change, the issue goes to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for approval and then to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names for a federal OK, said Pete Boulay, the assistant state climatologist at the DNR who oversees geographic features.
About three or four requests are processed each year, Boulay said. Geographic features like rivers, lakes, creeks, islands, points and hills can be named through the process; civic features, such as roads, cities or towns, cannot.
Features may be named after a person only if the person has been dead for at least five years.
Names also must avoid confusion with similarly named features. “They couldn’t decide to name it Lake Elmo, for example,” he said.
Boulay said he can recall just one time when the U.S. Board on Geographic Names disagreed with a Minnesota decision. The federal board in 1996 did not approve “Private Lake” because they feared it “would appear to be a no-trespassing sign rather than an actual name,” he said.
The Washington County Board last year, after months of discussion and debate, voted to change the name of Halfbreed Lake in Forest Lake and Scandia to Lake Keewahtin. The name change came after a petition was presented to the city of Forest Lake regarding the lake’s derogatory name.
GOOD MEMORIES
In Cottage Grove, David Wolterstorff said he has happy memories of swimming in his family’s lake in the summer and skating on it in the winter.
“Back then, we were able to take the tractor out on the ice,” he said. “We’d take a rope, and we’d do the whip-around, spin-around and have fun with that. All the neighbors came and did that.”
He said naming the lake after his father’s first name — rather than his last — was a no-brainer.
“It’s easier to say,” he said.