Dale Reservoir
(1918)
Roseville, Minnesota

In the last decades of the 1800s, the Saint Paul suburb of Roseville drew its drinking water from Lake Phalen, located about 4 miles to the east. By the 1910s, when the community’s rapid expansion began to outgrow the lake, the city allocated $250,000 to build a 30 million-gallon, reinforced-concrete reservoir on a broad hilltop northwest of the intersection of Larpenteur Avenue and Dale Street. (An enclosed reservoir would also allow the city to better control the chlorination of its drinking water, a practice it had adopted in 1914.)

Horse teams began excavating the 30-foot-deep, 5-acre Dale Reservoir in 1916 and completed construction in 1918 using 19,264 cubic yards of concrete and 1.1 million pounds of reinforcing bar. Saint Paul’s water system continued to expand throughout the twentieth century, however, and by 1960, the Dale Reservoir’s service was limited to Roseville. At the same time, general water usage began to decline, and by 2000, the cost of maintenance and repairs on the structure were prohibitive. The reservoir was drained in December 2009 and demolished in April-May 2010.

Access provided courtesy of Saint Paul Regional Water Services.