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On 100 years ago: No more swimming allowed in Potter's Lake
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Comments
joebloe 1 year ago
Two questions. Isn't it called Potter lake and was it alot bigger then. I don't know how you would have any kind of race on it now.
Sarah St. John 1 year ago
Hi Joe,
It has come to be called Potter Lake, but in earlier years, it still had the apostrophe-s that designated it as having been named after state senator Thomas Potter in 1911. I am not sure when the usage changed from Potter's to Potter.
It was a bit bigger. Here is a picture from 1911:
http://www.oread.ku.edu/2010/april/19/stories/potter.shtml
It was 16 feet deep at the time and you can see from the picture that it could have hosted a small boat race without too much trouble. Years of subsequent storm runoff (and maybe people throwing things in there) had reduced the depth to about 6 feet by the mid-1950s, when it was dredged for the first time.
Hope this helps -- thanks for reading!
johnwoods 1 year ago
It appears that maybe the ban on swimming wasn't permanent after all.
According to the KUHistory.com website (http://kuhistory.com/articles/a-lakes-progress/) a springboard and diving tower were installed in 1914 by James Naismith.
Chancellor Lindley formed a committee in 1924 to study the situation. There were beginning to be water quality problems, and several more drownings had occurred. They decided to finally forbid swimming. So Naismith built a 7-hole golf course around it instead! It slowly went away after World War II.
A total of seven people have died in the lake.
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