Del Wehrspann, an Iowa farm boy who became a Minnesota River Valley livestock buyer, hadn’t planned on becoming an activist who would stand up to local and state officials.

But his anger at seeing the river damaged by drainage led to a protracted legal battle and to him helping form the CURE group — the most effective and active environmental organization on the Minnesota River.

A northwest Iowa farm boy who turned down staying on his family’s farm because of the degradation of the landscape, Wehrspann moved in the 1960s to a spot outside Montevideo.

“The Minnesota River here was so pristine in the ’60s compared to the Des Moines River,” Wehrspann said.

“Then I saw the river degrading here and the same changes in agriculture that contributed to the Des Moines River’s damage, and I became an activist,” he said.

“I wanted to keep it from turning into a sewer.”

In the late 1970s, Wehrspann found himself in court trying to stop the drainage of a wetland on the edge of Montevideo and to get changes to a drainage ditch that he thought was affecting a spring-fed stream on his property.

Today the wetland is mostly intact and filled with wildlife and has a bike trail around it. “Now people have built homes and stores around it because they appreciate having it.”

The long lawsuit and battles with county, school district, city and state officials made Wehrspann an outcast with many, but he said attitudes have changed — to a degree — since then.

During the lawsuits, Wehrspann and others hired engineers who found that the little two-mile-long ditch built to divert water from the city added 2,300 tons of sediment per year to the Minnesota River.

“It was born out as the little ditch became a big gully and a spring that had a sandy bottom was knee-deep in mud.”

Eventually, Wehrspann got a monetary settlement and the county has redesigned the ditch so sediment is filtered out through a gravel pit before hitting the river.

The experience got Wehrspann and another Montevideo activist, Patrick Moore, to begin an organized group of local citizens to work on raising awareness about the river. They turned to local lawyer and soon-to-be Congressman David Minge to help organize the Clean Up the River Environment group.

“The river needed to be a focal point. We wanted to start a group that would give people support. CURE struggled for a while. A lot of credit has to go to Patrick and his organization skills and to the Land Stewardship Project, which helped a lot.”

Starting with 25 members, CURE today has 500 members and remains the most active environmental organization dedicated to the river. The group was a key player in getting hundreds of millions of federal and state dollars to put 100,000 acres of sensitive farm land into grass under the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program in the early 1990s.