“This place has been here for a long time…a little bit of prairie held loosely in the fingers of sparkling blue lakes clothed in gloves of the dark green foliage of oaks and other trees that grew along the shores,” wrote Harold Anderson, a local historian and businessman of Alexandria. In 1871 the Alexandria Post reported: “Alexandria as a summer resort compares in its air to sunny Italy. Indeed, the whole of Douglas County seems to be intended for one grand pleasure garden.