Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Battle Lake, MN

Battle Lake is a city in Otter Tail County in west-central Minnesota, named for the lake it borders, which early French cartographers rendered as 'Lac du Battaile.'

The lake's name recalls the long Dakota–Ojibwe conflict, including a 1795 battle after which the Ojibwe called West Battle Lake Ish-quon-e-de-win-ing, meaning 'where but few survived.'

The town of Battle Lake was first platted on October 31, 1881, by Torger and Bertha Olson, as the Northern Pacific Railway built its track and station through the couple's homesteaded land.

A 23-foot-tall fiberglass statue of Chief Wenonga, a Leech Lake Ojibwe leader who survived the 1795 battle, stands in Halvorson Park on the shore of West Battle Lake and has greeted visitors since the early 1980s.

The 2020 census counted 857 people in Battle Lake, within the city's 1.47 square miles, all of it land.

Halvorson Park is the starting point of the paved Glendalough Trail, which runs from town into Glendalough State Park.

Glendalough State Park, just outside town, became a state park in 1992 after the land was donated to The Nature Conservancy in 1990; it holds six lakes, including Annie Battle Lake, a non-motorized heritage fishery.

Glendalough's 1905 lodge hosted two U.S. presidents during the decades when the property was a private retreat, before its purchase in 1928 by Minneapolis Tribune publisher F. E. Murphy.

Battle Lake sits in Otter Tail County, which with 1,048 lakes has more lakes than any other county in the United States.