Sauk Centre, Minnesota

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Sauk Centre, Minnesota

By Jean Paschke

If they thought of him at all, the people of Sauk Centre once thought of Harry Sinclair Lewis as the youngest and geekiest of Dr. Edwin J. Lewis's three sons. An indifferent student, unpopular and unathletic, he excelled only in debate and drama. He spent his youth reading, playing alone, tagging after his father and brothers, pulling pranks and shamelessly eavesdropping on his elders. In 1920, when Lewis published his novel Main Street, Sauk Centerites were furious with the man who had apparently renamed his home town Gopher Prairie and portrayed it as a place of tasteless dwellings inhabited by cloddish rustics and a few clueless, would-be intellectuals. Some recognized themselves or their neighbors in paper-thin disguise and were not amused. The Sauk Centre Herald refused to acknowledge the book until six months after its publication, and the library banned it for a while.

But by 1930, when he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (he'd declined it in 1926), Sinclair Lewis had gone from town pariah to favorite son. Today Sauk Centre attracts scholars, writers, lovers of literature, and ordinary visitors from around the world. They tour the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center and the Boyhood Home and gaze up at the window of the author's father's former medical office on the corner of Original Main Street and Sinclair Lewis Avenue. They dine and sleep at the Palmer House across the street where Lewis was a teenage night clerk. (He was fired when a salesman missed his train because Lewis, his nose probably in a book, failed to give him a wake-up call.) They feed the ducks and enjoy the band concerts in Sinclair Lewis Park and attend the annual Sinclair Lewis Days and Sinclair Lewis Writers Conference. And they wonder how this small, pleasant town could have been the basis of such controversy.


	"...the sort of shambling prairie village described in Main Street; a village of low wooden shops, of cottages each set in its little garden, of rather fine trees, with the wheat a golden sea for miles about." — Sinclair Lewis

For explanations, start at the interpretive center at the south end of Main Street. It preserves Lewis photographs and memorabilia, including a complete set of his novels and his burial urn. The 1945 Time magazine with Lewis on the cover and review of Cass Timberlane are here, along with his much-rewritten galley proofs. A lamp sheds a soft glow on the desk where Lewis wrote the books that tagged him as the premier middle-class spokesman of his generation.

Drive north on Main Street and notice the Gothic Revival Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan. The oldest continuously occupied church in town, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. Young Lewis took Greek lessons from its priest, Mr. Garland. A block away, a distinctive cupola marks Bryant Library, one of the few remaining Carnegie libraries in the country. Lewis spent many hours here and incorporated it into Main Street as the Gopher Prairie Public Library. A block west is the Lewis family church, First United Church of Christ. Two blocks farther down Main Street, turn left on Sinclair Lewis Avenue and go two more blocks to the boyhood home, an unspectacular green and gray wood-frame house with a gingerbread porch. Writer Pearl Buck once pondered how such a "fiery, honest, impatient spirit" could have come of such a house.

Restorers working on the house in the 1960s relied on the memories of friends and neighbors for details and scraped down to the bottom layer of wallpaper, then reproduced it. Most of the period furnishings were purchased or donated, though there are a few pieces the Lewises owned, including an oak and metal-filigree side table, dining room buffet, red velvet platform rocker and the small wooden bed where young Lewis slept.

"This was the first home in Sauk Centre to have modern heating, in 1900, when Sinclair was 15," says docent Joyce Lyng. "He was very proud of this and wrote about it in his diary." Pointing out the "modern" bathroom installed in 1905, she says, "Dr. Lewis was set in his ways, rigid and unchangeable. He didn't like this new-fangled way of washing up." He took sponge baths in his bedroom as he had always done.

Sinclair's mother, Emma Kermott Lewis, died of tuberculosis when he was six. Her famous son's hooded, piercing eyes and stern countenance look out from her portrait in the sitting room. Stepmother Isabel Warner Lewis, affectionate and maternal, encouraged the boy to pursue literary interests. She established a study group, the Gradatim Club, that still meets today. Young Lewis would eavesdrop as they discussed poetry, literature and current events. In Main Street, this group is recreated as the Thanatopsis Society.

Dr. Lewis kept a second office in his home, furnished today with equipment belonging to his second son, Claude, also a physician. Sinclair's golf clubs stand in the corner; a primitive vacuum-tube radio, his gift to his father, takes up most of a large table. Here young Lewis watched his father amputate an arm and allegedly bury it in the back yard.

In the dining room, the table is set formally with blue willow china and engraved silver. Dr. Lewis presided at one end. The maid handed items from the kitchen via a hatch, and supper was at 6:00 sharp.

Visitors leave through the summer kitchen, where meals were cooked on a kerosene stove on warm days, and walk into the yard young Lewis once mowed. In the carriage house/garage, he played solitary games and wrote and put on plays for the neighborhood.

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Jean Paschke is a frequent contributor to HistoricTraveler.com's sister magazine, British Heritage. She recently completed a book on the history of the business district of her hometown, Melrose, Minnesota.

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