Celebrity is celebrity is celebrity, so a place markets what it can
Written: Sep 01 '03 (Updated Sep 05 '03)
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Pros: good food, remembering a writer
Cons: winter, I'm sure
The Bottom Line: You don't have to have read Sinclair Lewis; those marketing his Gopher Prairie have not read Main Street carefully
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| Jiahong's Full Review: Sauk Centre, Minnesota |
It sort of surprises me that I have visited homes of four of the first six American writers to win the Nobel Prize for literature (and four of the six born in the United States, though there have been nine who were US citizens at the time of the awards). The house shown here (thanks to SurgRN911) is the one in which Sinclair Lewis, who was the first US winner (in 1930) grew up. I’ve also seen the house in which John Steinbeck was born and grew up in Salinas, California and grander houses in which Nobelists Ernest Hemingway and Eugene O’Neill later resided (in, respectively, Key West, Florida and San Ramon, California). There are few furnishings that belonged to Steinbeck or O’Neill in those houses; more that belonged to the Lewis family and to Hemingway in the other two.
As far as I know, O’Neill didn’t write anything about the San Ramon Valley and there’s not a lot about Key West in Hemingway’s writings, but the Salinas Valley is central to Steinbeck’s writings and Sauk Centre is nearly as central to Lewis’s. Although Lewis’s most famous book, Main Street is far from being a celebration of his hometown, a native son who won the Nobel Prize for literature is something no other city (of any size) in the upper Midwest can celebrate. The indictment of narrow-minded busybodies in small towns resonates beyond the American Midwest, especially to Japanese who feel stifled, and there are pilgrims to what is now called "The Original Main Street," to the hotel (the Palmer House) in which Lewis worked a year after it first opened in 1901 and is now at the corner of "The Original Main Street" and Sinclair Lewis Avenue, and to the boyhood home, which is now a museum. (The house in which he was born is across the street and is not open to the public.)
One might wonder about a town promoting itself by recalling something and someone who was very critical of the town, but even a writer who is read with decreasing frequency can become a commodity and draw visitors. My less than systematic observation of shrines to brooding, alcoholic writers of books that are not notably cheerful is that the docents are (1) female, (2) not particularly interested in the writing that is the raison d’être for remembering the writer, and (3) much more interested in the domestic implements and how households once functioned than in anything directly relating to what the writer wrote. A slight exception in the case of the Lewis childhood home is the probably legendary claim that as a boy he buried amputated limbs his father had cut off in the back yard. A little ghoulishness sells…
The house, which is at 810 Sinclair Lewis Avenue, two blocks off Main Street (a left turn at the Palmer House if driving in from I-94), is open daily between Memorial Day and Labor Day. It is not very grand, though allegedly it was the social center of the small town in the first years of the 20th century. Dr. Lewis’s office was across from the Palmer House, and the family went to church at the (Episcopalian) Church of the Good Samaritan on Main Street. The Boyhood Home includes Dr. Lewis’ roll-top desk and Sinclair’s childhood bed. The tour of the house ends in the summer kitchen, which leads out to what was a carriage house that became a garage and was where the boy Sinclair wrote and staged plays.
A desk of the author’s is at the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center, just off the interstate. It includes displays of the process (from jotting down character names to heavily revised proofs) of his million-selling novel Cass Timberlane, the urn in which his ashes were shipped from Italy back to Sauk Centre (where they were interred in the family plot in the cemetery), and memorabilia from the premiere of the movie adaptation of Cass Timberlane in 1945 that brought Lana Turner to town—but seemingly not Spencer Tracy, her costar in it—to Sauk Centre.
The town’s Bryant Library, one of the few original Carnegie libraries, was not built until Sinclair was 19, but must be a place he spent some time in. I’ve already mentioned that he worked for a time at the Palmer House. (He was fired for failing to wake up a traveling salesman who missed his train, BTW.) That hotel was renovated during the 1980s and is a comfortable old-time hotel. Among other things, that means the rooms are not very large or rich in closets. They are, however, very well air-conditioned and have cable television and an early 20th-century look. The range of room prices is $49-$99. (For more information, see http://www.thepalmerhousehotel.com/.)
The hotel has a good restaurant that is open from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m. Walleyed pike seems to be a major part of the local cuisine. It is also available in various forms at Hennington's a "supper club" (the noon meal is called "dinner" in rural Minnesota and a "supper club" does not seem to require memberships) that opens at 5 p.m. (it is closed on Monday nights between Labor Day and May 1). I’m not sure that prime rib is on the menu every night, but what I had on a Saturday night was quite good. Many of the tables have a view of Fairy Lake (I didn’t glimpse any fairies either while eating or on the drive.) Hennington's is on the east shore of Fairy Lake. 5 miles NNW of Sauk Centre on (you guessed it!) Fairy Lake Road (#10853).
There is another lake (Sauk Lake) inside Sauk Centre with a park, a boatdock, and campground (with 70 campsites available May 1st to October 15th) a short walk from the Palmer House. (For further information on it, see http://startribune.exploreminnesota.com/listing/index.cfm?id=464.) I saw Baltimore orioles in the park along with many red-winged blackbirds, some yellow warblers, white pelicans, and Foerster's terns. Plus there were nighthawks in the sky visible from our room in the Palmer House before dusk. I don’t know what human night hawks do in Sauk Centre, though, as already noted, the Palmer House restaurant and bar are open until 1 a.m.
I can’t guarantee that visiting Sauk Centre will provide inspiration into small-town Midwestern America or into the writings of its famous prodigal son. For a visitor, it is not a stultifying place from which to flee. It is a pleasant enough place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there, either (though house prices are strikingly low to someone from the San Francisco Bay Area!).
Sauk Centre is 108 miles northwest of Minneapolis, Minnesota, 130 miles southeast of Fargo, North Dakota on Interstate 94. The population as of the last census was 3,581.
Recommended:
Yes
Best Time to Travel Here: Jun - Aug
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