The main use for the St. Croix in the late 1800s and very early 1900s was to float logs from the woods in northern Wisconsin down to the mills on the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers. The St. Croix was in an ideal location, but it was not the ideal river. It was often broad and shallow, whereas lumberman preferred a deeper faster river. One key issue was Angle Rock. Massive log jams would build up at Angle Rock. This would cut off the supply of logs and cause the mills to shut down until the jams could be cleared.

To address the problem of the log jams, Frederick Weyerhaeuser decided to build a dam about 11 miles up river from the St. Croix Falls. They leased land from local farmer Charlie Nevers. They sunk piles into the river, built stone cribs, and installed 15 sluicing gates and one huge eighty foot wide Bear Trap Gate. The dam was very expensive, costing $250,000 in period money. The investors hoped to revover this cost by charging tolls on wood that passed through the dam, and by improved operations of the boom site and mill at Stillwater. At the time, this was the largest wooden dam in the world, and the Bear Trap Gate was the largest dam gate in the world.

The dam was operated on a two week schedule. Water would be backed up behind the dam for 2 weeks. Then lumberman would be told to get their logs into the river. Once the gates were opened, the logs would slide past the dam and ride the wave of high water downstream. As soon as the logs were through, the dam would be closed up for another two weeks.

The supply of logs was largely exhuasted by 1902. The dam was sold to Northern States Power. NSP wanted to use the dam to control the river flow while it was building the new dam at St. Croix Falls. NSP ran the until the 1950s. In May of 1954, high water damaged the structure. The dam had lost much of its usefulness after the St. Croix Falls Dam was completed. Now that Nevers Dam was unsafe, NSP decided to completely remove the remaining structure. There are no remains of the dam in the river proper. A 100 foot section of the dike remains in place on the Wisconsin side, and much of the dike remains intact on the Minnesota side of the river within the St. Croix Wild River State Park.

The Nevers Dam also functioned as a highway crossing over the St. Croix River. The top of the dam featured a flat platform sutiable for buggy traffic and later for cars. The 85 foot long central gate featured a small through truss bridge to carry traffic over the discharge outlet. When the dam was removed, locals lost a convenient river crossing point.

The Nevers Dam featured a very small electrical generator. It was used to power electrical lights on the structure to allow log processing to work 24 hours a day. This was the first electrical equipment in the area, and people reportedly drove from miles around to see the lights in operation at night.