Home > Plan a trip > Touring > Roadside attractions > Roadside Distractions

Roadside Distractions

Have you seen it? A contest for everyone who loves the odd and offbeat.

The Tourist Troll lives in Mount Horeb, Wis.

At MidwestWeekends, we love anything that makes us veer off the road and say, "Wow, what the heck is that?''

A lot of highly unusual things can be found along the streets and highways of the Upper Midwest. We call these things Roadside Distractions, and we always take a photo.

Now we're having a contest so you can see some of our favorite things, too.

Kate Fitzwilliams of Baraboo, Wis., was the first to identify the location of our ninth Roadside Distraction as Mount Horeb, Wis., just west of Madison.

He's the Tourist Troll, one of 22 wooden trolls along Main Street (aka The Trollway) and around town, including two at Little Norway heritage museum.

And the rat? According to carver Michael Feeney, it "follows him everywhere he goes, subsisting on The Tourist Troll's constant trail of crumb and scraps of food.''

Mount Horeb has gone to town with the troll theme, conceived because the population once was predominantly Norwegian and also because it needed to draw tourists back to its businesses after downtown was bypassed by Wisconsin 18/151.

It calls itself Troll Capital of the World, and it can be found at Trollway.com. The local brewpub is called the Grumpy Troll, which hosts the Thirsty Troll Brew Fest in September.

A sandstone jester is among a dozen gargoyles in Pipestone, Minn.

A jester in Pipestone

Our eighth oddity can be seen in the southwest corner of Minnesota.

Kris Schulze of White Bear Township, Minn., knew that Pipestone is the home of this irreverent jester, who is thumbing his nose at . . . well, we don't know.

He's one of a dozen sandstone gargoyles, including an ogre blowing a raspberry, on the quartzite facade of the 1896 Leon Moore Building.

The downtown building is one of 20 on the National Register of Historic Places, each made of the locally quarried pink rock, as hard and grainy as pipestone is soft and smooth.

Leon Moore not only owned a quartzite quarry, but he could sculpt stone. And obviously, he had a sense of humor.

For more about the town, see Pipestone homage.

For more about Pipestone, the Jeffers Petroglyphs and Blue Mounds State Park, all places where quartzite pops out of the prairie, see Road trip: Southwest Minnesota.

Hamburger Charlie in Seymour

In the friendly little town of Seymour, Wis., just west of Green Bay, Hamburger Charlie stands in the town park.

Hamburger Charlie lives in Seymour, Wis.

Dee Nagel of Seymour was first to identify the 12-foot statue of Charlie Nagreen, our seventh Roadside Distraction.

The story is that in 1885, at the age of 15, Charlie loaded up his oxcart with meatballs and drove from his home in Hortonville, Wis., to the fair in Seymour.

His meatballs didn't sell well on plates because people wanted to keep moving between exhibits. So Charlie squashed the meatballs between slices of bread, put onions on top and called it a hamburger, after the German town where ground beefsteak was popular.

He sold his burgers at area fairs for the next 65 years. In 2007, the Wisconsin Legislature recognized Seymour as the Original Home of the Hamburger.

Every year, on the first Saturday in August, the town celebrates Burger Fest, featuring a hot-air balloon rally, a hamburger-press strength contest, a ketchup slide, a burger-eating contest and the World’s Largest Hamburger Parade.

There's also a giant fiberglass burger on a grill in the town park. We don't know how much it weighs, but at Burger Fest in 2001, the townsfolk cooked up a real burger that weighed 8,266 pounds.

Herman Rusch included a self-portrait in his Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden & Museum.

Herman Rusch and Prairie Moon

Our sixth entry can be found along the Mississippi River in southwest Wisconsin, halfway between Alma and Fountain City in Cochrane.

Richard Stryker of St. Paul was the first to identify Prairie Moon Sculpture Garden & Museum and its creator, Herman Rusch.

Rusch was a retired farmer who, looking for "a good way to kill old-age boredom,'' began fashioning sculptures out of concrete, stone and broken glass.

By the time he died in 1985 at age 100 — "Beauty creates the will to live,'' he said — he'd fashioned nearly 40 sculptures, including a Hindu temple, three dinosaurs, a crenellated stone watchtower and a beautiful arched fence, with conical red posts tipped with gold.

There's also a self-portrait in concrete, but it's a poor substitute for the real Rusch, who often played his fiddle for visitors.

"I met Herman Rusch when he was almost 100,'' says Leo Smith, a renowned carver who works in Fountain City. "He was a little bitty guy who was always smiling, and when he played the fiddle, he exuded joy.''

The Kohler Foundation restored Rusch's works, as well as three by Rushford, Minn., farmer Halvor Landsverk, and curious visitors can roam the grounds from dawn to dusk.

The Cochrane-Fountain City area was a wellspring of what the foundation calls outsider art. It's also restored and added several pieces by Cochrane shopkeeper Fred Schlosstein, a shopkeeper in Cochrane, and John and Bertha Mehringer of Fountain City.

Between 1920 and 1940, Schlosstein created a concrete village in his yard. It included people, buildings and animals — elephants, deer, bears, herons — plus castles and planters.

He also kept two alligators in ponds. He died in 1953, two years before Herman Rusch started working on his outsider-art oeuvre.

The Mehringers who built their Fountain City Rock Garden between 1933 and 1935, with rocks, mirrors and many shards of clear, brown and green glass. Several of their birdhouses have been moved to Prairie Moon.

For more, see Fountain City oddities and Road trip: Wisconsin's concrete art.

The Snowshoe Priest of Lake Superior

High above Michigan's L'Anse Bay, between the Keweenaw and Abbaye peninsulas west of Marquette, a 35-foot bronze statue of a robed priest, holding a cross and snowshoes, stands on a cluster of steel clouds, suspended 25 feet above the ground by beams.

Jeff Brandon of Marion, Iowa, was the first to identify the Shrine of the Snowshoe Priest.

The Snowshoe Priest was Father Frederic Baraga, a native of Slovenia and one of the original tough guys of Lake Superior.

Long before John Beargrease delivered the mail along Minnesota's North Shore, Father Baraga delivered the Word — everywhere.

He arrived in 1830 at age 23 and traveled by canoe, horse, dog sled and snowshoe between Ojibwe settlements in Sault Ste. Marie in Michigan, Grand Portage in Minnesota and La Pointe on Wisconsin's Madeline Island.

He became known as the Snowshoe Priest and, in his spare time, compiled an Ojibwe dictionary that still is used.

He became the first bishop of Upper Michigan in 1853, served until his death in 1868 and is buried in the 1890 Romanesque cathedral in Marquette, where efforts to canonize him began in 1952.

Those efforts got a big boost in March 2010, when a patient with a liver tumor, as shown by CT scan and ultrasound, prayed to the bishop and placed his stole over the pain. After that, exploratory surgery found no tumor.

If the miracle is recognized as authentic, the diocese will need to verify one more miracle in order for the bishop to be declared a saint.

There's another memorial on the Cross River on Minnesota's North Shore, where the priest blew safely ashore during a storm in 1846. It's known as Father Baraga's Cross.

The shrine is one of many roadside distractions around Lake Superior. For more, see Giants of Lake Superior.

An American Gothic barn

Just east of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on U.S. 30 near the entrance to Palisades-Kepler State Park, local art teacher Mark Benesh has painted a reproduction of Grant Wood's famous "American Gothic'' on the front of a barn.

Joel Arnold of Savage, Minn., was the first to identify its location, and he wins a "Life's Too Short to Stay Home'' T-shirt.

Grant Wood was born nearby in rural Anamosa and moved to Cedar Rapids when he was 10. He studied at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and traveled to Europe, but he returned to Iowa to paint and teach art at the University of Iowa.

"American Gothic'' is at Chicago's Art Institute, but the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art holds the largest collection of Wood's work. The studio where he painted "American Gothic'' in 1930 is three blocks away, and tours are free.

Anamosa holds the Grant Wood Art Festival on the second Sunday in June. To see the rolling countryside Wood loved to paint, drive the 68-mile Grant Wood Scenic Byway from Anamosa to Macquoketa and on to Bellevue on the Mississippi River.

The estate on which Wood and two other artists founded the Stone City Art Colony in 1932 still can be seen just west of Anamosa overlooking the Wapsipinicon River.

The house depicted in "American Gothic'' is in Eldon, Iowa, near Ottumwa, and is open daily for free tours. The American Gothic House Center provides pitchforks and costumes for photos.

A covered bridge in Wisconsin

Around here, folks have a powerful sense of nostalgia — call it the Norman Rockwell effect.

We love to go on scenic drives in the countryside, and we love our covered bridges, even the ones that only look old.

This is one of the prettier ones we've seen. It spans a tiny creek that flows from the southeast corner of Lake Koshkonong, between Fort Atkinson and Milton in southeast Wisconsin, and it features a roof with a caboose-style cupola.

It was built in 2000 with century-old barn timbers, mostly for the benefit of bicyclists on the 8½-mile Glacial River Trail, which parallels Wisconsin 26. It's also become popular as a setting for wedding photographs.

Phil Van Valkenberg of Golden Lake, Wis., was first to identify the bridge. Van Valkenberg, a veteran bicyclist, produced all seven editions of the state's excellent Wisconsin Biking Guide, now out of print (if you still have copies, hang onto them).

In Minnesota, bicyclists also got lucky on a 12-mile spur of the Lake Wobegon Trail in central Minnesota. From Albany, the trail heads north to Holdingford, where a covered bridge crosses the Two Rivers River.

Holdingford, which built the bridge in 2008, now calls itself "Gateway to Lake Wobegon.''

For photos of three more covered bridges, see our Facebook album.

A park in Chicago

Pam Larson of Fergus Falls, Minn., won our second Roadside Distractions contest and a "Life's Too Short to Stay Home'' T-shirt. She identified Oz Park in Chicago's Lincoln Park neighborhood as the site of the Scarecrow.

The Scarecrow is accompanied by the Tin Man, the Cowardly Lion and Dorothy and Toto (see our Facebook album for pictures). The park honors L. Frank Baum, who lived in nearby Humboldt Park when he published "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'' in 1900.

It includes Emerald Gardens and Dorothy's Playlot, which also honors retired local schoolteacher Dorothy Melamerson, whose savings funded many park improvements.

The park is a block east of the corner of Webster Avenue and Halsted Street, an easy trip from downtown and a nice destination for children who are tired of sightseeing and museums.

For more, see Chicago with kids.

Hobos in Harmony

The first winner of Roadside Distractions was Diane Perkins of Lakeland, Minn., who identified a trio of hobos at the start of the Harmony-Preston Valley State Trail in the southeast Minnesota town of Harmony.

“Life Along the Rails’’ is the work of local woodcarver Stanley “Slim’’ Maroushek, who trained with the famous Bily brothers of Spillville, Iowa.

The figures pay tribute to the hobos who once camped near the train depot and looked for odd jobs they could do around town. The locals often called them hoe-boys, since many weeded gardens.

This shows Steamtrain Satch (in front), Handbag Hallie (in back) and Hank (with bag). Other hobos are Sleepy Slim, Oklahoma Oscar and Dawg.

Harmony is only three miles from the Iowa border and is known for Niagara Cave.

For more about the area, see Cave country. For more about the Bily brothers, see Road trip: Northeast Iowa.

Last updated on February 2, 2012

E-mail:
Name:
Zip Code:

Other stories in "Roadside attractions"