Read Online Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor - Free Book Online
Authors: Garrison Keillor
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churned up. Sanitation being informal, houses sitting in a sea of mud and manure strewn with scrap lumber and odds and ends of every sort of trash, a man could stand on the backstep, look at the yard, and with a clear conscience throw out a bucketful of slops and the contents of the thunderjug: what was wrong with a little bit more when there was so much already?
The names on the 1854 tax roll included: Ames, Hinkley, Putnam, Giddings, Cutter, Bellville, Branch, Crandall, Getchell, Stewart, Brown, Knox, Varney, Porter, Sutton, Beatty, Hatch, Frost, Fairbanks, Lane, Court, Robbins, West, Sellers, McKinney, Smith, Woodbury, Twitchell, Lindsay, Hines, Burns, many of whom formed the “Fifty-fourers” club in 1860.
Fifty-nine votes were cast on April 7, 1854, electing the town board, Mr. Getchell being the leading vote-getter with seven, four others receiving six apiece.
A flour mill was completed about May 1, located on the creek. There was hardly enough wheat to keep it running, but a mill had been in Bayfield’s plan so it was built, howbeit much smaller than pictured. In 1855, when the wheat harvest was more abundant, the mill broke under the load, having been poorly designed by Mr. Robbins from an article in
The National Husbandman
, which omitted several small parts having to do with lubrication.
One store had been opened, McKinney’s and Branch’s, to be joined by a second, the Mercantile, which then began a newspaper,
The New Albion Star
, to promote its goods, which rivaled that of “any emporium west of Chicago” for “dry goods, groceries, clothing and provisions.” The Albion House, a “large and commodious” hotel, was kept by Mr. A. M. Varney, and “in the thoroughness of its appointments has secured a reputation second to none in the territory and would do no discredit to any town in the Northwest, even St. Paul.”
“Fifty-one buildings, including dwellings &c., now enliven the western shore of Lake Wobegon, * a considerable work in a townof scarcely sixteen months age, especially for persons of refinement,” wrote the
Star.
The term “persons of refinement” had been used by Bayfield in the circulars he mailed east, and apparently it was they who made the arduous journey to his settlement, expecting to find persons of similar refinement when they arrived. New Englanders all and Congregationalists, they brought with them a love of music and pictures, not to mention back-breaking loads of books. They built first the College—a one-story frame cottage with two Greek columns slightly taller than itself, then the handsome brick edifice—and some time later built a grammar school, the students having been housed in the train depot, the railroad having not yet arrived. Of the fifty-one buildings, of which the “&c.” included some woodsheds and privies, one of the first was an Opera House, a long shed where every Saturday night those who could sing did and the others observed, and where, in 1856, an opera was performed, Mrs. Groat’s
Song of Hiawatha
for “5 singers, violin, cornet, harmonium, and tom-tom” and featuring the town’s own Madame Juliet Putnam, whose composer-husband James Nelson Putnam penned, upon his arrival, the town’s first song:
O blessed Muse grant us ere long
The gift of glorious word and song
That we may sing, ere breath is gone,
The praises of New Albion.
And, the very next day, his petition answered, he brought forth
What dazzling sights mine eyes behold,
So beauteous, bountiful and bold,
Where blessings are made thousandfold—
Our noble home, New Albion.
“The city of New Albion was owned and laid out by a company of energetic men from Boston, principally Mr. Benjamin Bayfield, who has now turned his energies to the lumbering business elsewhere,” Mr. Getchell wrote home to his brother in Milford, Maine. “It is a thriving and very refined community where King Alcohol has yet to rear his terrible head, and growing like a house
The names on the 1854 tax roll included: Ames, Hinkley, Putnam, Giddings, Cutter, Bellville, Branch, Crandall, Getchell, Stewart, Brown, Knox, Varney, Porter, Sutton, Beatty, Hatch, Frost, Fairbanks, Lane, Court, Robbins, West, Sellers, McKinney, Smith, Woodbury, Twitchell, Lindsay, Hines, Burns, many of whom formed the “Fifty-fourers” club in 1860.
Fifty-nine votes were cast on April 7, 1854, electing the town board, Mr. Getchell being the leading vote-getter with seven, four others receiving six apiece.
A flour mill was completed about May 1, located on the creek. There was hardly enough wheat to keep it running, but a mill had been in Bayfield’s plan so it was built, howbeit much smaller than pictured. In 1855, when the wheat harvest was more abundant, the mill broke under the load, having been poorly designed by Mr. Robbins from an article in
The National Husbandman
, which omitted several small parts having to do with lubrication.
One store had been opened, McKinney’s and Branch’s, to be joined by a second, the Mercantile, which then began a newspaper,
The New Albion Star
, to promote its goods, which rivaled that of “any emporium west of Chicago” for “dry goods, groceries, clothing and provisions.” The Albion House, a “large and commodious” hotel, was kept by Mr. A. M. Varney, and “in the thoroughness of its appointments has secured a reputation second to none in the territory and would do no discredit to any town in the Northwest, even St. Paul.”
“Fifty-one buildings, including dwellings &c., now enliven the western shore of Lake Wobegon, * a considerable work in a townof scarcely sixteen months age, especially for persons of refinement,” wrote the
Star.
The term “persons of refinement” had been used by Bayfield in the circulars he mailed east, and apparently it was they who made the arduous journey to his settlement, expecting to find persons of similar refinement when they arrived. New Englanders all and Congregationalists, they brought with them a love of music and pictures, not to mention back-breaking loads of books. They built first the College—a one-story frame cottage with two Greek columns slightly taller than itself, then the handsome brick edifice—and some time later built a grammar school, the students having been housed in the train depot, the railroad having not yet arrived. Of the fifty-one buildings, of which the “&c.” included some woodsheds and privies, one of the first was an Opera House, a long shed where every Saturday night those who could sing did and the others observed, and where, in 1856, an opera was performed, Mrs. Groat’s
Song of Hiawatha
for “5 singers, violin, cornet, harmonium, and tom-tom” and featuring the town’s own Madame Juliet Putnam, whose composer-husband James Nelson Putnam penned, upon his arrival, the town’s first song:
O blessed Muse grant us ere long
The gift of glorious word and song
That we may sing, ere breath is gone,
The praises of New Albion.
And, the very next day, his petition answered, he brought forth
What dazzling sights mine eyes behold,
So beauteous, bountiful and bold,
Where blessings are made thousandfold—
Our noble home, New Albion.
“The city of New Albion was owned and laid out by a company of energetic men from Boston, principally Mr. Benjamin Bayfield, who has now turned his energies to the lumbering business elsewhere,” Mr. Getchell wrote home to his brother in Milford, Maine. “It is a thriving and very refined community where King Alcohol has yet to rear his terrible head, and growing like a house
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