Some of the landmarks have changed, but eight years ago, directions to the Rainbow Inn were easy: Stay on Highway 169, watch for Wigwam Bay and the Grain Belt beer sign. I found it, pulled in, and walked into the lodge. The light was comfortably dim, slanting in through the row of front windows. A man and a woman were leaning against opposite corners of a blond wood bar; they were silent, but looked up as I entered. My friends had stopped by last year to ask about cabins, I explained, and I was wondering if they had any available for the coming summer. After a few seconds, the woman started to cry.
I switched gears from oblivious to confused. They had recently decided to sell, the man said in a resigned tone. They just couldn’t make it work anymore. Things were changing too much; people weren’t coming like they used to. I should be able to rent a cabin from the new management later in the season, he added, if I wanted one. I didn’t know what to say, so I left it at “thanks” and left them to their privacy.
The Rainbow Inn is now gone altogether, but I remember it fondly. I did stay there that summer with a group of friends, and returned several times in later years. This cluster of five tiny white cabins, each with trim painted in a different color of the rainbow, was my scruffy introduction to the classic mom-and-pop resort. My friends and I were late bloomers in regard to the tradition of the Minnesota lake cabin, and we were surprised and a little overwhelmed at the range of options. The large resorts, outfitted with golf courses, convention centers, water parks, and the like, were too elaborate (and expensive) for our liking. Our desires were simple—just a place to sleep while we explored the area—so the Rainbow Inn was the perfect answer. For a modest weekly rate, we could come and go as we liked, cook our own food, and bring along various combinations of family members, partners, friends, and pets.
Cabin number one was my favorite. It had red trim and a concrete dog statue next to the front door. The dog’s ears had broken off, leaving two rusty antennae, stubs of rebar, sticking out of its head. Mille Lacs Lake sparkled and beckoned beyond, though it was separated from the cabins by the two lanes of Highway 169. Inside, the focus was the kitchen, with its antique refrigerator and tiny gas stove. The table and chairs blazed with the curvy chrome and primary-colored optimism of 1950s-era modernism, but this was no ironic retro rehab. Simply put, the place hadn’t changed for a long time. A diminutive couch and non-functioning TV finished off the main part of the cabin. In the “back” was a compact bathroom, next to a gas space heater and a bedroom that was essentially filled by the sagging bed. Cabin number one and its companions were situated on a short loop drive next to the central lodge building, to which a strip motel had been attached sometime in the fifties.
Generations of Midwestern families once came to places just like the Rainbow for their summer vacations. Some stayed in the same cabin at the same resort during the same week, year after year. At times, mothers and children would stay all summer, with dad commuting from the Cities on the weekends. For those without the means to purchase their own lake place, resort cabins provided the fishing, swimming, sun, and relaxation without the responsibilities of maintenance. Long a vital part of Minnesota culture and heritage, the cabin “up north” has attained the mythological patina of simpler times—mainly among city dwellers fueled by a Hamm’s beer-sign-tinged nostalgia. And this is only natural, considering that the golden age of the family-run resort has long since vanished.
My family took long road-trip camping vacations while I was growing up in the seventies. Every summer my parents, brother, grandma, and I would pile into the car, with camper in tow, and head out for weeks. We took scenic routes from the Midwest down to Florida, to Oregon, New England, California—or wherever we wanted. As a young child, I believed that my dad had been everywhere in the world at least once, because he always seemed to know where he was going on these trips. Even when he pulled out a map, I figured he was just refreshing his memory; maybe it had been a while since he’d been in that particular area. In later years, when I helped navigate, I still loved the sense of exploration and discovery, which fueled my curiosity about the world.
That style of vacation was a novelty to my parents and grandmother, but it was also helping to usher out the heyday of the mom-and-pop resort. Both the road trip and the resort are products of automobile tourism, made possible and promoted by a heavy investment in infrastructure and advertising starting shortly after World War I.
My friend (and landlady) Neva Bridgwater experienced the growth and decline of the Minnesota resort industry firsthand. Her parents, Howard and Lela Welty, opened the Wigwam Inn on Wigwam Bay of Mille Lacs Lake in the 1930s, when she was a little girl. The vacant woodlot where the resort once stood is just outside my office window, up the bay from the Rainbow Inn’s former location.
Neva has large, gentle eyes and a quick smile. She is athletic and whipcord thin, the result of a lifetime’s worth of swimming, which began when she fell off a dock at the age of five. Her uncle saw it happen. He said, “Young lady, you’re going to learn to swim!” and taught her on the spot. A friend of Neva’s, Jim Kalk, who ran the Wigwam Inn for a while in the late 1990s, told me that he saw her out in the lake nearly every day it wasn’t frozen. “It made me a little nervous seeing her out there so far. I’d try to keep an eye out while I was working, to make sure I could still see her swim cap above the waves, but she never had any problems.” Neva now lives on the north side of the lake with her newlywed husband, Trevor. When the couple is not elk hunting in the Rockies, they’re busy caring for their horses and building an addition on their home.
Neva’s parents brought their young family to Mille Lacs in the early thirties from a little town in Iowa. Years of drought had become an increasing burden on their farm, and Howard Welty had always loved hunting and fishing, so he decided to make a living from that. The Weltys first leased the Vineland Lodge, a long-gone resort that was situated at the outlet of the Rum River from Mille Lacs Lake. Howard had a natural talent and love for exploring the lake, and quickly established himself as a fishing guide. After discovering the good fishing up north, on Wigwam Bay, he looked for resort opportunities there.
Howard inquired about the Kingfisher Lodge, which was located on the bay, but its owner, Earle Brown, wrote that “we are not in a position to lease this property at the present time owing to the fact that we do not know exactly where the new highway is to be located and what effect this new location will have on the property.” Neva still laughs at that letter. Seven decades later, years of uncertainty over a proposed four-lane divided highway once again keeps people guessing about the future of their properties.
Not long after Brown’s rejection, the lodge immediately south of the Kingfisher went up for sale. The Weltys bought it and expended a lot of elbow grease over the winter. They lived in the lodge and rented out two cabins. At first, they focused mainly on a fishing service. Howard’s reputation as a first-rate guide grew quickly, and he had a steady flow of travelers from his hometown in Iowa. Back then, many farmers had a few weeks of leisure in June. “They didn’t have much to do after the corn was planted,” Neva told me. “Farming is much more diversified now, but at that time it was corn, corn, corn.” With the kids out of school, early summer became the natural time for a vacation. Repeat business became a sure thing, with visitors coming from as far away as Chicago. “Mille Lacs walleye were publicized in Chicago, and many groups would come up just to fish with Dad,” said Neva.
The biggest challenge at the Wigwam Inn was lodging. With only two cabins, many of their launch customers had to stay elsewhere. The serendipitous solution to the squeeze on accommodations came when a truck driver accidentally crashed into the Kingfisher Lodge. Earle Brown decided not to rebuild, and sold the Kingfisher’s five cabins to the Weltys. They moved them over to the Wigwam Inn and soon built an eighth, the largest, which was always in the most demand.
Between the fishing opener and Labor Day, running the Wigwam Inn was a twenty-four-hour job. Laundry and housekeeping chores were never-ending, and Neva’s mother ran a lively business cooking breakfast and lunch for the fishermen. The family also stocked a small grocery store in the lodge. In an era before convenience stores, most resorts kept on hand many of the basics that their guests would need. Suppliers of milk, bread, meat, and other staples made deliveries from Brainerd to the area resorts. This was usually a great help, except in 1946 when a Kremey Krust bread truck lost control and crashed into several of the resort’s boats on the beach. (In northwoods lore, there are a lot of runaway automobiles.) The resort also functioned as a gas station, and Gluek’s beer was available on tap in the lodge. The Wigwam Inn’s lodge became a gathering place not just for guests in the tourist season, but for locals year round.
On top of their duties related to maintaining the resort, Neva and her older brother, Francis, were responsible for entertaining the children of the guests. Some days they were in and out of the lake ten times or more, supervising young swimmers. “The fishermen usually came for three to four days at a time, and then families would start to arrive just after Memorial Day,” she said. “Most would stay for about two weeks. It was fun to get to know the ones who came back year after year.”
“Getting away from it all” was a Minnesota tradition long before the Weltys founded the Wigwam Inn. From the early days of the Minnesota Territory in the mid-nineteenth century, the northern air was thought to be invigorating and conducive to good health. The Lake Minnetonka area became a popular escape from the summer heat of the Twin Cities by the 1860s, and the rapid growth of railroads extended the possibilities in the subsequent decades.
As an industry, tourism provided a way to make a living in areas that had once been the domain of loggers and miners, and brought an economic dimension to the scenic beauty of the northwoods. In regions like the Arrowhead, which were still actively being logged, this created a clash of values and bolstered support for the early conservation movements. Then as now, tourists didn’t spend money to make trips of that magnitude in hopes of seeing clear-cuts. Areas like Mille Lacs, in fact, had been logged over several times by the early 1900s. But the second-growth trees still looked like a forest, and anyway the real draw, as it spread through word of mouth in the early and mid-twentieth century, was the fishing.
While cars did not lead directly to the creation of resorts, burgeoning highway development in the 1920s and 1930s did fuel the development of housekeeping cabins and fishing-launch services across central and northern Minnesota. A tourist brochure from the 1930s announced: “The Scenic and Shortest Route to the North is through the Main Entrance to Paul Bunyan Play Ground at Lake Mille Lacs.” The map on the back points out the advantages of the roads coming north from the Twin Cities. U.S. Highway 169 was “paved to the lake.” State Highway 65 was tarvia (an early road surface using coal tar) “almost to the lake,” while State Highway 56 remained a “good gravel road.” Another brochure from the 1940s assures tourists that “the roads which lead to Mille Lacs from every direction are wide and smooth.”
Even as roads from the Twin Cities extended farther north, gas rationing during World War II offered an additional boon for Mille Lacs-area resorts. For those who could vacation during the war, Mille Lacs was pretty much as far as they could drive, and continued to mean literally “up north” to many people. Furthermore, gas rationing meant that it simply wasn’t feasible for vacationers to tow boats with them. Not only were Mille Lacs resorts readily accessible from the Cities, but the guests also needed the cabins, food, and fishing service they offered. A brochure produced by the Mille Lacs Lake Association in the 1940s depicts a cluster of eight resorts on Wigwam Bay, including the Wigwam Inn and Vic’s Motel & Resort (later the Rainbow Inn), along with the Shady Knoll Resort, Pirate’s Cove, the Wigwam Bay Resort, Cofield & Whitehead, the Westshore Resort, and the North Star Resort.
Road development spurred economic development, but it ultimately became a double-edged sword for the resorts. Mille Lacs had never been directly connected to the railroads, and the first highways opened up the west side of the lake, including Wigwam Bay, to tourism like never before. The beach ridges on the western shore have probably always been a natural transportation route: first for foot travel, then for horses and wagons, and finally for motorized vehicles. The speed, noise and traffic volume of a late twentieth century highway were unimaginable to the driver of a Model T on an unpaved road, but those early byways set a precedent. They made the western bays an ideal setting for resorts—accessible yet beautiful. Today, the highway is a barrier between some of the resorts and the shore, although a number have managed to hold on due to the lure of their fishing launches.
The legacy of Highway 169’s impact on the area is most apparent at Seguchie Resort, on St. Alban’s Bay. Like the former Wigwam and Rainbow inns, it sits on the shore of Mille Lacs Lake, but it is cut off from the water by forty feet of pavement. Red and yellow cabins flank a narrow gravel road that provides access to the resort. This little road is unusual in that it has small but deep ditches on each side, and its own concrete bridge over Seguchie Creek. Owner Dave Kobilka explained that this road was the highway back in the twenties, when the resort was built. Realizing this, it’s easy to visualize the place as it was then, with a playhouse-scale highway doubling as a lane through the rows of cheerful cabins, the smell of fish frying, and the shouts of children running to the shore.
A likely option for the next phase of Highway 169 reconstruction would move the road farther back from the shores of Mille Lacs, on both Wigwam and St. Alban’s bays. It’s interesting to consider whether the early twenty-first century highway could spark a renaissance of mom-and-pop businesses along the lake, reconnecting the lakeshore resorts with the water.
Back in the late 1930s, “people would just love to sit and look out the window toward the north and watch the traffic,” Neva said. “It was a big thing then. Now we don’t think it’s so great.” She was talking to Jim Fogerty, who spent much of the 1990s compiling an oral history of the state’s resort industry. A curator at the Minnesota Historical Society, Fogerty selected the Wigwam Inn as a classic mom-and-pop resort case study for his project. Neva was his main source.
According to Fogerty, the Wigwam Inn is one of two main types of resorts, catering mainly to the fishing crowd, with guests sometimes staying for two, three, or four weeks. The other type has evolved from that mom-and-pop model into a more service- and recreation-oriented complex, with golf, tennis, conference centers, spas, and other amenities. This second type, where guests typically stay for a long weekend, dominates today, with familiar names like Cragun’s, Breezy Point, Izaty’s, and Ruttger’s. The more modest housekeeping resorts are hanging on, but just barely. Clearly, their popularity peaked in during the 1940s and 1950s.
Still, these older places have made a deep enough imprint on the Minnesota psyche to gain recognition as an integral part of our cultural heritage, warranting stewardship, studies like Fogerty’s oral history project, and even preservation efforts. Today, for instance, a thirties-era trading post is a prominent part of the Mille Lacs Indian Museum. Established by Harry and Jeanette Ayer, it characterizes the entrepreneurial spirit of many early Minnesota resorts.
The Ayers were licensed traders living among the Ojibwe community at Mille Lacs who in the early twenties purchased land, eleven rowboats, and supplies for building and furnishing tourist cabins. They lived in one of the cabins for more than twenty years, and rented the others to motor tourists and fishermen; the proceeds from the cabins and a dining hall financed the construction of the trading post. The cabins, which eventually numbered around two dozen, were at the center of several related enterprises that employed members of the Mille Lacs band of Ojibwe , including a boat works, a maple sugar factory, and a gas station. Wigwams and other traditional Ojibwe structures were built on the grounds, leaving little doubt that seeing “real Indians” was a definite draw in the tourist trade. The trading post was also a de facto community center for the band during this period, and provided an outlet for birchbark crafts, beadwork, and other traditional art.
The Ayers’ resort and trading post were always full during May, with fishermen doubling up in the cabins and perennially hoping for an early start. In the days before large fishing launches, rowboats were tied together and towed out to the middle of Mille Lacs Lake, where the fish retreated during warm weather. It was common practice at many resorts to send the boats off for the entire day with packed lunches. The motorboat could stay there with them, or go back at dinnertime (or signs of approaching bad weather).
Along with the trading post, the Minnesota Historical Society preserved several of the Ayers’ tourist cabins and their spartan furnishings. The low-lying beds look rather uncomfortable, and a small wooden table in one kitchen is set with enamelware plates and cups. But all it takes is a glimpse of Mille Lacs Lake through the gingham curtains to remember that the interior of these cabins was hardly the attraction.
Ruttger’s resort is a short distance northwest of Mille Lacs on Bay Lake. It has operated for more than a century as a family-run business. Jack Ruttger, the grandson of founders Joseph and Josephine Ruttger, was also a primary source for Jim Fogerty’s study, as Ruttger’s is a classic example of that second type of resort—the one that evolved into a major, upscale recreation site. Highway 6, which leads to Ruttger’s, evolved as Highway 169 did at Mille Lacs, but it does not carry as much traffic. Also, the alignment of Highway 6 shifted away from the resort as it was rebuilt over the years, leaving the Ruttger’s cabins in peace. The old mercantile and the filling station along the former highway are now part of the resort, converted into shops and a coffee house, and a new spa continues the tradition of adapting historic buildings for contemporary uses.
The Ruttgers’ earliest guests came in the 1890s on the railroad to the town of Deerwood, looking to escape the city summer; the first cabin was built in 1901, the same year the first family came for an extended vacation. Jack’s childhood memories of the Great Depression at his family’s resort contrast sharply with Neva’s of the Wigwam Inn. It turns out that even though Bay Lake is only about fifteen miles north of Mille Lacs, auto tourists were only just making it to Wigwam Bay, and so some summers saw a definite shortage of guests at Ruttger’s. They responded by trying to make every guest feel especially doted upon.
Thus Ruttger’s stayed one step ahead of the changes in American vacation evolution. The 1920s brought a heavy investment in tourist cabin construction, soon followed by a pioneering golf course in the pasture (shared with the cows). Later decades brought tennis courts, an eighteen-hole golf course (minus cows), apartment-style condominiums, and a convention center.
Meanwhile, at the Wigwam Inn, for example, the wooden boats purchased to replace the ones destroyed in the Kremey Krust disaster marked the end of their era. Aluminum boats were available starting in the 1950s and quickly gained in popularity, and while it would be decades before personal watercraft were substantial enough to tackle Mille Lacs Lake on their own, a trend toward visitors bringing their own boats began.
Likewise, an RV park became a focus of business at the Wigwam, although the lodge, cabins and the launch remained. Today, the buildings and dock are gone. The former resort is a park-like setting with tall oak, basswood, and ash trees, and the occasional RV electrical hookup sticking up through the grass.
The improved roads and the end of gas rationing set the stage for the long driving vacations of the late 1960s and 1970s. In my family’s case, if we had approached Mille Lacs on one of our road trips, we likely would have set up our camper at the Wigwam Inn and moved on after a day or two, rather than staying for a week or more, as guests had in the previous era.
In this sense, the heavy traffic passing the former Rainbow and Wigwam inns becomes a living metaphor. What was once a destination has become a corridor carrying people to other places. But this shouldn’t come as a surprise. The roads gave the resorts life, at a pause in the moving frontier of highway development. The resorts were inseparable from the highway, and jockeyed for position to be close to it. The ease of their trip was a sure sign of progress to the guests, and they celebrated it along with all else that was “modern.”
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