Fillmore County Flashback – The Peterson Trout Farms

By Cheryl Boyum Eaton

Peterson Museum Board Member

When I think of the Peterson Trout Farm, I think of the facility located south of Peterson on County Road 25, past the East Grace Cemetery. It was managed by Bill Atkinson in the 1950s. However, this was not the first trout farm at Peterson.

In 1874 Peter Peterson Haslerud, the founder of Peterson, owned a farm at the northwest edge of Peterson. It had a spring with a creek running through his property. He noted that brook trout flourished in this creek and decided to try raising them to sell.

He excavated eight ponds and arranged hatching compartments and ponds for varying sizes of trout. He procured 100,000 trout spawn and his enterprise proved successful. By 1881 he and his family had sold 60,000 trout to the state of Minnesota for stocking streams, besides other sales.

David Hudson assisted him in this enterprise and lived on the property. They used sucker fish to clean the bottoms of the ponds. Kingfisher birds also enjoyed their endeavor, so they covered the ponds with boards. Unfortunately, the fish didn’t grow as well, so the boards were removed and grass was allowed to grow in the ponds. This produced a scum on the top of the ponds which protected the fry and allowed them to grow faster without bird attacks!

Unfortunately, the business came to a halt when Mr. Haslerud died of tuberculosis in 1880 and his daughter Adeline, Mrs. Elmer Halvorson, inherited the land housing the trout farm. The Halvorsons had the ponds filled back in as they were afraid one of their young children would fall in and drown.

The next instance regarding trout occurred when Addis E. Hazard, a druggist from Rushford, bought the land on which the current Peterson Hatchery is located, along County Highway 25 south of Peterson. He created a very popular camping and picnicking site called Camp Hazard. The creek running through this site had trout and he created an artificial lake there also. I am not sure if he ever raised them for sale. This site was severely damaged by a flood in 1915 and, by the mid-1920s, the camp was abandoned. 

Following World War II, Charles and Seth Morse of Rochester, Minn., and Duffy Lewis and O. J. Ward of Lanesboro, Minn., purchased the Camp Hazard land. The Lanesboro men soon sold out and the Morses constructed ponds and raceways, first raising bait minnows unsuccessfully and then turning to raising brook and rainbow trout successfully. They hired Bill Atkinson to manage the hatchery and during his time of management, trout were delivered throughout the Midwest. Bill retired in 1960 and Ed Brink managed the site in 1961. 

In 1962 Jim Cady bought a third interest in the hatchery and took over the sales and promotion of the farm. A year later, Mr. Cady bought out the Morses and successfully expanded the operation, marketing and selling trout throughout a 20 state area. 

Jim Cady sold the Peterson Hatchery to the Minnesota DNR in 1988; they wanted to supplement the DNR’s trout production capabilities. They renamed it the Peterson State Fish Hatchery, and they began producing Atlantic salmon, lake trout and brown trout for stocking in Minnesota waters. They upgraded the facilities with round cement ponds covered with tent-like domes. The fresh spring water circles around and around these domes and is then drained. This motion cleans most waste material from the tanks and the waste goes into a composting pond where it is broken down by vegetation, snails and other organisms. This operation continues to this day. 

So, the Peter Peterson Haslerud Trout Farm may or may not have been the first trout hatchery in the state of Minnesota, but it certainly was one of the earliest!

References: History of Fillmore County, 1882, The Peterson Book written by John Erickson in 1974, the DNR Peterson State Fish Hatchery sheet and numerous articles from the Tri-County Record and The Rushford Star newspapers.