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When spring is a tease and days are gray, only one sport always comes through: Shopping.
And where better to shop than Stillwater? The little village on the Minnesota side of the St. Croix River has a Main Street that’s chockablock with antiques, books and bibelots from around the globe, filling every inch of storefronts once occupied by the blacksmiths and haberdashers and apothecaries of the logging era.
In summer, its streets are clogged with tourists, out to enjoy the riverside ambiance as well as the merchandise (See Summer in Stillwater). But in March, my friend Jean and I discovered, Stillwater becomes a candy shop for bargain-hunters.
After more than 150 years, this Minnesota river town's unrefined early days are history.
Once, legions of unkempt lumberjacks mobbed the streets of Stillwater, spending their wages at saloons and bordellos. Now, mobs of weekend tourists roam through town, sipping cappuccinos, sampling wine and shopping for gifts and antiques.
Stillwater has come a long way since the days when King Pine ruled. Reminders of the era are everywhere, however, in mills that now house antiques malls and splendid Victorian houses. Many of the lumber barons' houses now are bed-and-breakfasts and still carry their names — Bean, Mulvey, Sauntry, Staples. But a walk along any Stillwater street will yield a bumper crop of other painted ladies, complete with turrets, cupolas, gables and wrap-around porches.
When the innkeepers of the St. Croix Valley were trying to think of a way to get prospective guests through their doors, they didn't have to think long.
Hmm, they thought. Chocolate would make people come running. Let's offer wine-tasting, too. And gifts and discounts for those who reserve rooms.
Oh, it's almost diabolical.
There’s only one place in the Midwest where potholes are a tourist attraction instead of a nuisance.
Standing at the bottom of the 35-foot-deep Bake Oven, touching walls as smooth as vinyl, it’s easy to imagine the scene 10,000 years ago, when sheets of water from a melting glacier roared past Taylors Falls, into what now is the St. Croix River Valley. They came with such fury that whirlpools laced with sand and gravel drilled cylindrical holes into solid rock — potholes, the world’s deepest.
On the Minnesota side of the river, that fury must have had apocalyptic proportions. Behind Angle Rock, where the river takes a hard right, there’s an otherworldly place of giant slabs and cavities. Here, so many potholes formed that they merged into what now is called the Devil’s Parlor. The Bake Oven, where one pothole bored into another, is nearby, along with the Lily Pond, the Hourglass and the 67-foot Bottomless Pit.
On a lovely day in fall, few places show off this region better than the St. Croix River Valley between Minnesota and Wisconsin.
The 52-mile stretch from Taylors Falls to the St. Croix’s confluence with the Mississippi at Prescott has everything a tourist could want — shops, historic houses, theaters, train excursions, boat cruises.
But mostly, it has scenery — scenery I wanted to show my nieces Alissa and Livia, who had left Florida to start careers in the Twin Cities. As it turns out, the St. Croix looks awfully good to people raised in Florida.
Walking around Lindström, it's not hard to guess where the area's first settlers came from.
If the multitude of umlauts don't give it away, the herds of Dala horses and straw goats will. Factor in the giant white coffee pot in the sky, and you can be pretty sure this is Swedish country.
In the 1850s, poor Swedes came pouring into the lakes country west of Taylors Falls. It wasn't the best farmland, but it was cheap, and it looked like Sweden — lots of water, lots of trees and, unfortunately, lots of rocks. Still, it seemed like heaven to the peasants, and the letters they sent home brought more Swedes.
In St. Croix Falls, Wis., all paths lead to enlightenment.
Hiking on the 1,000-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail, bicycling the 48-mile Gandy Dancer State Trail or paddling on the 252-mile St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, people follow a path that was cut by a 600-foot-high wall of ice and traversed by woodland nomads, fur traders and railway laborers.
Visitors can soak up lore galore about ancient and natural history. But the real revelation here is St. Croix Falls, the unassuming river village that's at the start of it all.