08/04/2026
Gull Lake sits at the heart of the Brainerd Lakes area, and at nearly 10,000 acres it's the largest of Minnesota's seven separate lakes carrying the Gull name, the centerpiece of an eight-lake chain spanning Cass and Crow Wing counties. Logging outfits used the site long before it became a vacation destination, building temporary dams at the lake's outlet through the late 1800s to help move timber downstream. That informal arrangement became permanent in 1912, when Colonel Francis R. Shunk and George Freeman, the same engineers behind Lock and Dam Number 1 on the Minneapolis stretch of the Mississippi, designed the official Gull Lake Dam, raising the lake's water level by roughly five feet as part of the broader Mississippi Headwaters reservoir system, the last dam of its kind built in that entire network.
Resort development followed close behind. T.H. Harrison drew up plans in 1909 to build a resort on the lake, and his son later partnered with Chester Start to add a golf course and hotel. That early tourism push got a real marketing boost in 1936, when Merrill Cragun Sr. and Jack Madden organized Brainerd's first Paul Bunyan festival, a modest parade with a few bands and a log-rolling contest built specifically to put the region on the map. It worked well enough that Madden needed cash during the early years of World War II and sold Cragun his own lakefront property, leading Cragun to build a handful of cabins in 1940 and the original lodge in 1945, the beginning of what's now one of nineteen resorts still operating on Gull Lake today, alongside longtime names like Madden's and Grand View Lodge.
The lake's shoreline has filled in dramatically since those early resort days, now running nearly 28 homes or cabins for every single mile of shore, among the most densely developed lakefronts in the entire state. Every winter it becomes the site of the Brainerd Jaycees Ice Fishing Extravaganza, a charity contest that drills roughly 20,000 holes into the ice in a single event, turning the lake's frozen surface into a genuine small city for one weekend a year. Nearly a century after a handful of families bet that Paul Bunyan and a golf course could turn a logging lake into a destination, Gull Lake remains exactly that, one of the defining vacation spots in central Minnesota, built on ground that spent its earliest working years moving timber rather than tourists.
