Location
Wahkon is in Mille Lacs County WAHKON, a city in section 17 of Isle Harbor Township, was incorporated as a village on November 6, 1912; it was established in 1885 as Potts Town, changed to Lawrence in 1891 when the post office was established, and changed again in 1910 to Wahkon. This name is the Dakota name of Mille Lacs, spelled wakan in the Dakota dictionary by Rev. Stephen R. Riggs, defined as "spiritual, sacred, consecrated, wonderful, incomprehensible." The Dakota applied this name especially to a very remarkable but small island far out in the lake, about seven miles northwest from Wahkon, consisting of rock, granitic boulders piled by the ice of the lake to a height of nearly 20 feet, a noted resort of gulls and pelicans, called on maps Spirit Island or Pelican Island. Only 1 or 2 feet below the lake level, and visible under the water for 100 feet or more to the north and east, is a ledge of the bedrock described by David I. Bushnell in Brower's memoir of Mille Lac (p. 121, with a picture, on p. 118, of the heaped rock masses forming the island). Wonderful as the island is, it was the origin of the Dakota name of the lake, of this village, and, by a punning perversion noted on a later page, the name of the Rum River. From: Upham, Warren. Minnesota Place Names: A Geographical Encyclopedia. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, First edition 1920. Third Edition 2001. Print.
