Listen and subscribe to our podcast: Apple Podcasts | Spotify
Where is the real Lake Wobegon?
Garrison Keillor’s famous fictional town took inspiration from central Minnesota — including some businesses that remain open today.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
August 9, 2024 at 4:53PM
LAKE WOBEGON, Minn. — It’s a place where all the women are strong, the men are good-looking and the children are above average. It’s an expanse of rolling farm fields speckled with churches, ballparks and gathering spots like the Chatterbox Café.
For a time, the fictional place at the heart of Garrison Keillor’s longtime radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” was one of the most famous small towns in the country. But which real Minnesota town (or towns) served as the inspiration for Lake Wobegon?
Minnetonka resident Bill Baldwin, who serves as pastor at two small churches in central Minnesota, asked Curious Minnesota, the Star Tribune’s community reporting project, for help identifying the place that’s most like Keillor’s mythical setting.
We first went straight to the source. But Keillor, an Anoka native who now lives in New York, declined to comment. Still, newspaper clippings, interviews with locals and Keillor’s own words (from his writing and a recent appearance at Avon’s Spunktacular Days festival) narrowed our search to a single county: Stearns.
Keillor is celebrating the 50th anniversary of “A Prairie Home Companion” this year in stops around the country — including a visit to Avon in June. (Minnesota Public Radio ended its longtime partnership with him in 2017 after allegations of his inappropriate workplace behavior. MPR renamed the show and later cancelled it.)
His Stearns County visit also marked 25 years of the Lake Wobegon Trail. The path takes bicyclists and snowmobilers west from Waite Park to Osakis and has a branch that travels north from Albany past Bowlus. All of these places likely contributed a bit to Keillor’s lore.
Keillor dreamed up his radio show when living in the area, he told the Avon crowd of about five dozen people huddled under a bandshell to avoid the pouring rain. In the early 1970s, Keillor lived in a brick farmhouse a few miles south of Freeport with his wife and son.
At the time, he had just started his broadcast career at St. John’s University and wrote occasional stories for the New Yorker. He said he was inspired after researching a story about Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry.
“I wanted to revive live radio — a live variety show on Saturday evenings,” Keillor said of the show that was first broadcast in 1974. “People in big cities have a romantic idea about small towns — and so that became a part of the show.”
Ever since he started telling stories on the radio, people have asked him if Lake Wobegon is a real town, Keillor wrote in a 2000 essay for National Geographic.
“I started telling people that the town is in central Minnesota, near Stearns County, up around Holdingford, not far from St. Rosa and Albany and Freeport, northwest of St. Cloud, which is sort of the truth, I guess,” Keillor wrote.
Former state Rep. Bud Heidgerken thinks Keillor drew his biggest inspiration from Freeport, a city of about 700 people along Interstate 94 in the center of Stearns County. Like many rural cities, it has a small downtown with a post office and a few businesses on Main Street — surrounded by acres of corn and cows.
“This is about as close as you can get to Lake Wobegon,” said Heidgerken, who has led dozens of tour groups looking for the mythical place over the years.
In his essay, Keillor recalled feeling like an outsider in Stearns County.
“Nobody ever welcomed us to town,” Keillor wrote. “[We] lived south of Freeport for three years and never managed to have a conversation with anyone in the town. I didn’t have long hair or a beard, didn’t dress oddly or do wild things, and it troubled me. I felt like a criminal.”
“In order to be accepted, I had to invent a town like the imaginary friend I had in second grade,” he wrote.
Some longtime Freeport residents — who still gather at the places they believe inspired Lake Wobegon locales like the Chatterbox Café and Sidetrack Tap — shared their own memories of that time.
“We always thought he was kind of a strange guy because nobody knew who he was,” said Bud’s brother Peter Heidgerken, 84, who grew up on a dairy farm just south of Freeport.
The Heidgerkens’ sibling, the late Charlie Heidgerken, once ran Charlie’s Café — a spot many locals believe inspired Keillor’s Chatterbox Café. Peter, who still gets coffee at the café every morning, said he remembers Keillor sitting quietly in the restaurant’s first booth, listening intently and occasionally asking questions. He did the same next door at the Pioneer Inn Bar (said to be the inspiration for Lake Wobegon’s watering hole, the Sidetrack Tap).
Bud usually joins Peter at Charlie’s Café, where he pours his own coffee and greets everyone before sitting down. He remembers Keillor as aloof.
“If you look at his early pictures, he wore suspenders and had a puffy beard. He didn’t fit with the culture of the area,” Bud said. “But he took the whole area in and combined everything that he experienced and he picked up a lot of stories sitting in the booths here.”
Bud said the café was a hot spot for locals in the morning, with four or five booths of men in the front and the women gathered in the back: “The place would just have a hum to it. So he named it the Chatterbox Café.”
In his essay, Keillor wrote that Holdingford is the town that looks the most “Wobegonic” to him with its “little downtown of elderly brick buildings,” a “graveyard full of big stones” and a mill by the river.
Lake Wobegon was also likely inspired by New Munich, the tiny town closest to where Keillor lived, and Avon’s trio of Spunk lakes.
Lake Wobegon’s ambiguity — along with a sense of nostalgia — contributed to people’s fondness for the fictional setting, said John Decker, a Cold Spring resident and retired archivist from Stearns History Museum.
“I think the bigger cities had a lot of stuff going on and a lot of people were commenting on that,” Decker said. “I think [Keillor] took a different approach and talked about rural, small-town living. And I think he found a soft spot in a lot of people’s hearts.”
Keillor shared a similar thought in his essay. He answers the “Where is Lake Wobegon?” question with a bit of whimsy and wistfulness: “I find that if I leave out enough details in my stories, the listener will fill in the blanks with her own hometown.”
If you’d like to submit a Curious Minnesota question, fill out the form below:
Read more Curious Minnesota stories:
Post 246 in Minneapolis got its name more than a century ago.
