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There are thousands of lakes in the north woods, but the most famous one is a stone's throw from Illinois.
Lake Geneva has been the favorite retreat of Chicago folks for 150 years, and everybody who was anybody had a place there: the Wrigleys, Maytags and Schwinns, but also cartoonists, actors, brewers and bottle-cap makers.
There’s just something about barns.
They appeal to everyone — city folk, country folk, anyone who's ever played with a barn kitten. They're
graceful structures, built in every size and shape. And they evoke a nostalgia for simpler times, when ordinary people who
worked hard could prosper.
It took a servant a day and a half to polish one of their chandeliers. It took three Norwegian craftsmen three years to carve their woodwork.
Still, it's hard to begrudge Chester and Clara Congdon their nice things, because apparently they were very nice people.
Chester gave 11 miles of Lake Superior shoreline to the people of Duluth and made sure it was preserved for them in perpetuity. Clara donated her time and resources to the Methodist church; her servants ate the same meals she did and were paid twice as much as others. The couple slept together in a small bed, took their six kids and nephew on vacations to historic sites and expositions and welcomed a constant stream of friends and relatives to the home they called Glensheen.
H.H. Bennett wanted tourists to come to the Wisconsin Dells, and thanks to him, they came.
Boy, did they come.
In Bennett’s day, they stayed for weeks, playing croquet and checkers and going on picnics, boat excursions on the Wisconsin River and perhaps to a magic-lantern show of stereoscope slides from Bennett’s studio.
In the grand scheme of things, Galena, Ill., was destined to be a flash in the pan.
The flash came from the shiny lead sulfide upon which the town's fortunes were built in the 1830s, '40s and '50s; galena is the Latin word for the ore. It made many people rich, and in the 1850s, Galena, three miles from the Mississippi, was the busiest port between St. Paul and St. Louis.
The new railroad approached, but the steamboat lines made sure it stayed away from Galena. Then the lead market weakened, trade routes shifted and the town's steep hillsides, which had given up their trees for the smelting furnaces and their limestone for houses, began to erode into the Galena River. By 1910, the river had shrunk so much the steamboats couldn't get through.
On a September day in 1894, Hinckley, Minn., was hell on earth.
As a logging and rail center midway between St. Paul and Duluth, the town had grown quickly. But during the summer of 1894, less than 2 inches of rain fell. Small fires smoldered in the countryside, many started when hot cinders from trains landed in tinder-dry slashings — the crowns, stumps and branches left behind by logging crews.
On Sept. 1, breezes fanned small fires near Mission Creek and Pokegama, villages south of Hinckley. They joined, and the flames, breaking through a thick layer of warm air, were turned into a fiery cyclone by cool air traveling down from above.
Poor Herbert Hoover.
Orphaned at age 9, he spent his childhood picking potato bugs, weeding onions and cleaning barns. His first job after graduation from Stanford was shoveling ore.
Then he grew a moustache, bought a tweed suit and passed himself off as an experienced mining engineer. Sent to Australia at
age 23, he found a vein of gold that yielded his London employers $65 million.
New Ulm hasn't always understood the kind of people who color outside the lines.
That describes the entire family of Anton Gág, a German-Bohemian artist whose work can be seen at New Ulm's Cathedral of the Holy Trinity and the brewery of August Schell, who was his patron and sent him to art school in Chicago for six months. All seven children were creative, spending their days drawing, telling stories and building sets for plays.
"He didn't want the children to be like other children," says Mary Ann Zins of New Ulm.
Two centuries ago, Minnesota and Wisconsin were ripe for the picking.
Iron ore lay under forests of tall white pine, fertile farmland lay under prairie grasses, and rivers teeming with beaver led to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic Ocean.
It all turned into money when ambitious men arrived, gathering up the goodies like kids on Halloween. They logged, they mined, they traded and they shipped. The men who made the biggest fortunes did it all, plowing their first round of profits into railroads, land and banking.