Lake Fish Hatchery Historic District

The Lake Fish Hatchery Historic District comprises nine buildings built between 1930 and 1932 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the National Park Service Rustic style. The buildings exhibit a consistency of style and construction, with exposed gable trusses and oversized paired logs at the corners, all with brown paint. The district is located on the shore of Lake Yellowstone near the Lake Hotel The hatchery was established to provide trout eggs for use, mostly outside of Yellowstone. The hatcheries and stocking operations had both positive and negative impacts on the quality of angling in Yellowstone National Park in the first half of the 20th Century. Many native populations were displaced by non-natives, but there was quality brown and rainbow trout fishing in the Firehole, Madison and Gibbon river drainages. Stocking and hatchery operations had had an overall negative impact on the Yellowstone cutthroat and Westslope cutthroat populations and in 1953 the National Park Service began closing the hatcheries and stopping stocking operations. The last fish stocked for the benefit of anglers was in 1955 after some 310 million fish had been released in park waters since 1889.