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Even tourists from the great European capitals are impressed by Summit Avenue.
It's not just one mansion, but one after another, all the way from the Mississippi River to the massive Cathedral of St. Paul, overlooking downtown and the state Capitol.
This five-mile stretch is one of the most splendid, best-preserved Victorian streets in the United States. The oldest are at
the east end, on the lip of the bluff overlooking downtown and the Mississippi River.
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.
Geneva will seem citified to people who vacation on woodland lakes. There's a good reason to go there, though: It's entertaining to gawk at extreme wealth, and there's no better place to do it than Lake Geneva.
There's a story behind everything in Spring Green.
Frank Lloyd Wright's story begins in the 1860s, when his unconventional grandparents and their 10 children emigrated from Wales to settle this dramatic valley of the Wisconsin River, which came to be known as "the valley of the God-almighty Joneses.''
The story of Alex Jordan's House on the Rock, atop a limestone spire that overlooks the valley and Wright's beloved home, is rooted in spite. After his father traveled from Madison to show Wright blueprints for a rooming house, and was harshly snubbed, he vowed to get even and "put a Japanese house up out there.''
The Falls of St. Anthony wasn't a very tall waterfall.
But it was broad and thundering, and the only major drop on the Mississippi. More importantly, it got good PR from two best-selling travel guides, Father Louis Hennepin's 1683 "Description de la Louisiane'' and Jonathan Carver's 1778 "Travels through the Interior Parts of North-America,'' both of which exaggerated its height.
Other explorers came, and in the 1820s ordinary tourists followed the first steamboats up the Mississippi, where they admired the falls, gawked at the Dakota living in nearby tepees and dined on such Wild West delicacies as buffalo, elk and sturgeon.
There are many colossal lumberjacks, voyageurs and Indian chiefs scattered around Minnesota, all paying tribute to a colorful past.
But there's only one Big Ole.
He stands at the end of Alexandria's Broadway Street, 28 feet of glowering Viking, brandishing a spear and clutching a glistening silver shield that reads "Alexandria, Birthplace of America.''
In a bucolic corner of southeast Wisconsin, a famous acting couple created a retreat unlike any other.
Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Milwaukee-born Alfred Lunt and his English wife, Lynn Fontanne, dominated the
Broadway and London stage, where they were known as "the Fabulous Lunts.''
They had so much star power they took only roles that allowed them to work together — and to spend summers at their beloved country house near the village of Genesee Depot.
In 1920, northern Wisconsin already was a playground for people from Chicago.
And when Prohibition flung open the door to organized crime, its remote lakes and forests became even more attractive to a certain kind of Chicagoan.
Al Capone had a fortified summer home on a lake near Hayward, to which hydroplanes flew whiskey from Canada. His lieutenants
frequented the saloons and brothels in Hurley. Rival Roger Touhy vacationed in Minocqua, fishing with a machine gun.
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.
Once, every child in America celebrated Christmas without battery-operated toys.
Instead, they played flap jacks and dominos. They made paper ornaments for the tree. They got an orange brought all the way from Florida.
That’s still what kids do during Christmas time at Old World Wisconsin, where it’s always the 19th century. Danish, Norwegian, German, Polish, Finnish and Yankee families toil there, trying to get ahead on the American frontier.
In the circus, nothing succeeds like excess. And no one succeeded at that more than the Ringling brothers.
In the last half of the 19th century, Americans clamored to be amazed. Tent shows traversed the countryside; Wisconsin alone
had more than 100.
On the Mississippi, showboats brought entertainment to river towns. In 1869, two circuses — one was Dan Rice’s Own Circus, whose proprietor’s clown character was the inspiration for Uncle Sam — put on performances in the Iowa river town of McGregor. They enthralled the 17-year-old son of a poor German harness maker.
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.
Many people like to drive around the countryside looking for them. But they're disappearing fast.
There's something inspiring about a certain pocket of northeast Iowa.
It's nurtured a a beloved children's-book author, a famous composer and two brilliant woodcarvers. It's stirred battalions of people who create art, preserve heirloom seed and carry on Norwegian culture.
There are a lot of stories in these hills and valleys on the edge of the Driftless Area, which escaped the flattening effects of the glaciers.
He was young and dashing, the son of Wisconsin's first millionaire, an Indian trader who became a country gentleman.
She was a beautiful debutante, daughter of a Fort Snelling general who was Custer's commander in South Dakota. The pair loved art, horses and books; after they met in St. Paul and married, they honeymooned in Europe, where they commissioned an artist to cast their handsome faces in bronze.
H. Louis and Nina Sturgis Dousman were frontier nobility, the Kennedys of Prairie du Chien, where their home, Villa Louis, was
a kind of Camelot on the river.
In Chippewa Falls, people owe a debt to two kinds of folks: the bubbas and the geeks.
The first came to harvest the lumber and stayed to drink the beer, or so claims the brewery: "It takes a special beer to attract 2,500 men to a town with no women,'' says Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing, founded in 1867 and now the oldest business in town.
Then came the guys with slide rules. The son of the city engineer spent his childhood in Chippewa Falls tinkering with radios, then went off to war and college. Seymour Cray co-founded Control Data in the Twin Cities but in 1962 returned to Chippewa Falls, where he opened a lab, putting the locals to work on the world's first supercomputer.
It's obvious from one look at the shop-lined streets of Amana, the largest of the seven Amana Colonies, that modern commerce is in full flower there. Even so, the first question asked about the villages is: Are the Amana people Amish?
And no wonder — the people of the Amanas spoke German, lived simply and adhered faithfully to Scripture. Many still do. But no, they never were Amish.
The first people of the Amanas were German immigrants who came to Iowa in 1855. They were devoutly religious, as were many of the time, but in addition they believed in Inspirationism — that God speaks to modern-day people through chosen Werkzeuge, the German word for tools, rather than ordained ministers.
If you're in the mood to loosen belts as well as wallets, the holidays are the time to do it.
At madrigal dinners, channel portly Henry VIII in a Tudor castle settling. During Dickens dinners, wallow in 19th century England — the England of "A Christmas Carol,'' not "Oliver Twist.''
Which is to say, there's no gruel course. When I ate my way through the Victorian Progressive Dinner in the mansions of Dubuque, I dined on chicken salad in puff pastry, bisque, London broil and English trifle.
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.
It's funny how, wherever there are tourists, there are ghosts.
In Chicago, two ghost tours put titillated tourists on the track of Al Capone and John Dillinger, thrill-killers Leopold and
Loeb and serial murderer H.H. Holmes, the Devil in the White City.
There's enough lingering ectoplasm in St. Paul, Wausau and Winnipeg to keep guides busy there, too, especially around
Halloween.
In the northwest corner of Illinois, there's no more cheerful place than Galena.
Today, it's known for its shops and giggling bands of women on a girlfriend getaway. But in the 1850s, it was the busiest
port between St. Louis and St. Paul, and rows of elegant homes were built with lead-mining fortunes.
Eventually, demand for lead waned, and the river connecting Galena to the Mississippi filled with silt. The town went into a deep sleep until the 1960s, by which point it had become a virtual museum.
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.
Walnut carpenter's lace. Fireplaces made of Italian mosaic tile. Yards of leaded glass and richly printed, century-old wallpaper.
Oooooohh.
That's what the two dozen people on a house tour and progressive dinner in Dubuque, Iowa, kept saying as the tour progressed from one Victorian mansion to another.
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.
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.
