![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
In the early days of highway travel, some very ordinary folks toiled to enliven Wisconsin's roadsides.
Concrete dinosaurs appeared, and a muskie pulled by horses. King Neptune held court next to Snow White and her dwarves.
There was an ocean liner encrusted with glass, a Hindu temple and mythic figures from the American frontier —
Sacagawea, Paul Bunyan, Kit Carson.
It's easy to speed right through the river town of Fountain City, on the way to someplace else, but that would be a mistake.
In Fountain City, all is not as it seems. A Hindu temple sits amid hay fields. One of the world's largest collections of toy pedal cars occupies five barns on a bluff. Dreamlike Santas ride fish in a riverfront studio, models for copies sold around the nation.
On this seemingly ordinary stretch of the Mississippi, people have been inspired by . . . something. Perhaps it's the dramatic bluffs that loom above town. One morning in 1995, they sent a 55-ton boulder slamming into a house, which, overnight, became a tourist attraction. That's the kind of thing that makes a person look twice at his surroundings.
In Wisconsin, nonconformity is cast in concrete.
In the middle of the last century, a motley collection of ordinary folk — a dairy farmer, a car dealer, a tavern owner, a factory worker — took a sharp turn away from the ordinary.
Out of the blue, they began to fashion fairy-tale characters, castles, temples and historical figures out of concrete, adorning
them with bits of glass, crockery, porcelain and seashells and toiling until their yards overflowed with figures.
Paul Bunyan has been very good to Bemidji, Minn.
When Cyril and Leonard Dickinson and their Rotary Club cronies built their 18-foot lumberjack for Bemidji’s first Winter Carnival in 1937, they had no idea they were creating a national icon.
Their blocky Bunyan landed on the pages of Life magazine and the New York Times, and the 1938 Winter Carnival drew 100,000 people to the town of 7,200. It was a bonanza for Bemidji, mired in the Depression and down to its last sawmill.
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.
Only tough guys lasted for long around Lake Superior, and Father Frederic Baraga was one of them. The Slovenian priest arrived in 1831 and spent a long and frenetic life canoeing and snowshoeing between Ojibwe settlements in Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan; Grand Portage on the northeastern tip of Minnesota; and La Pointe on Wisconsin's Madeline Island.
One day in 1846, Father Baraga, learning of a possible epidemic among the Ojibwe in Grand Portage, set out from Madeline Island in a small boat with an Ojibwe guide. A terrible storm arose, but they were blown over a sandbar and into the quiet mouth of the Cross River, where the town of Schroeder is today. In thanksgiving, they erected a small wooden cross at the site, later replaced by a granite one.
The Snowshoe Priest, who compiled an Ojibwe dictionary in his spare time, became the first bishop of Upper Michigan and lived until 1868. He's buried in the 1890 Romanesque cathedral of Marquette, where efforts are under way to canonize him.
The origins of Paul Bunyan are lost in the wood smoke of long-ago logging camps.
The mighty lumberjack most likely was born in the camps of Maine or Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, northern Minnesota towns have taken the legend and run with it.
Akeley calls itself Paul Bunyan’s birthplace, and it’s got a good claim — it was the headquarters of the Red River Lumber Co., where, in 1914, a publicist named William Laughead is said to have written the first Paul Bunyan story in a company brochure. Today, Minnesota's largest Bunyan, a fiberglass 33-footer, kneels with outstretched hand outside the town's Paul Bunyan History Museum, where a 28-pound fish is labeled "Paul's Minnow."
