 |  |  | |  | |  |
| | | | | | |
 | ||||||
|
      |
|
location: rochester life > featured stories
|
Small Town Spotlight - Winona
By
Both the Minnesota and Wisconsin sides of the Mississippi are littered with few-hundred-person towns whose 19th century boom hopes turned to bust. It’s the same story —
Both the Minnesota and Wisconsin sides of the Mississippi are littered with few-hundred-person towns whose 19th century boom hopes turned to bust. It’s the same story — the last pines were clear cut and the grain mills and paddlewheel stopovers faded as the railroads diminished the Mississippi’s shipping stranglehold. A few of the river-edge towns — Red Wing is another one who’s done it right — have turned their turn-of-the-century stagnation into tourism gold. That lack of growth in the late 1800s acted as a historical formaldehyde, preserving the town’s heritage and historical buildings and eventually drawing tourists to its bluff-dropped quaintness. Winona, with a population of 30,000, comes across as a classic combination of working city and tourist town. It’s like La Crosse without all the Wisconsinites. “We’re a tourist destination,” says Winona Convention and Visitors Bureau director Pat Mutter, “but we’re still a city built on a composite industry. We don’t rely on the tourism as much as other cities along the river.” “The addition of the Great River Shakespeare Festival [a month-long summer event that recently wrapped up its second season] is a testament to that tourism focus as well as our work to become an arts destination,” says Mutter, who also points out numerous examples of other emerging tourism draws — a museum of maritime and river art and history slated to be built on the river next year; the Minnesota Equestrian Center (an indoor horse show facility that hosts dozens of events per year); the second year of the Dakota Homecoming and Gathering (an event designed to welcome the Dakota Native Americans back to their ancestral home). “We are doing all we can to promote tourism and have it play a more important role in our community,” Mutter says. Winona’s downtown, with more than 100 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, houses its share of antique shops and knickknack and trinket stores for the day trip browsers. After an 1862 Independence Day fire destroyed — to a building — nearly all of Winona’s downtown, much of the rebuilding was done in brick and limestone in the era’s popular Italianate style, but with local ties — the limestone hauled from nearby quarries and the bricks baked in local kilns. The downtown is billed as the “largest collection of Victorian Commercial architecture along the Mississippi.” The riverfront Levee Park draws boatwatchers to its four-block long seawall, where river scene murals decorate the dike wall. The replica paddlewheeler Julius C. Wilkie — a life-sized though landlocked re-creation of a steamboat that burned in 1981 — sits surrounded by concrete. Interior tours take you past miniature models of steamboats. The heart of the waterfront, though, is dominated by factories like Winona River and Rail and Bay State Milling and the Cenex and Archer Daniels grain terminals. Each year, according to the Port Authority of Winona, the city receives approximately 500,000 tons of commodities (grain, coal, salt and fertilizer are some of the main arrivals) and ships out roughly 2 million tons (much of it corn and soybeans). The bulk of the boat traffic is 1,000-foot-long barges (loaded with coal or concrete) shoved by 5,000-horsepower, twin-prop tugs (the “mud churners and stump chewers”). It’s a city that still relies on many of the businesses on which it was built. In 1858, the Minnesota Normal School, the first teachers college west of the Mississippi, was founded in Winona. Now with an enrollment of 7,000-plus students, Winona State University has been named one of America’s 100 Best College Buys for ten straight years. With enough in-city students and enough on-campus and off-campus housing, the area just south and west of downtown (dominated by WSU’s 47-acre campus) is centralized enough to give it a real college feel. Today’s telemarketers are vilified. Yet, there’s something warm and nostalgic about the Watkins Heritage Museum, a promotional museum on the east edge of downtown that traces the history of the Watkins company, a business rooted in door-to-door sales. In 1868, a Plainview man, Joseph Watkins, “perfected his direct sales strategy” by traveling door to country door in his horse-drawn carriage selling patent medicines like Watkins Vanilla and Watkins Red Liniment (made from Asian camphor and red pepper extract) and other natural remedies. By 1885, he moved his Watkins Medical Company to Winona, and by the mid 1940s the company’s 10,000 sales associates were shilling 200 products — they’d added things like herb tablets (vitamins), Egyptian Bouquet Talcum Powd
|
| | | |
|