Lake Wobegon | |
|---|---|
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| Country | United States |
| State | Minnesota |
| County | Stearns |
| Founded by | Garrison Keillor |
Lake Wobegon is a fictional town created byGarrison Keillor as the setting of the recurring segment "News from Lake Wobegon" for the radio programA Prairie Home Companion broadcast fromSaint Paul, Minnesota. The fictional town serves as the setting for many of Keillor's stories and novels, gaining an international audience withLake Wobegon Days in 1985. Described as a small rural town in central Minnesota, the events and adventures of the townspeople provided Keillor with a wealth of humorous and often touching stories.[1][2]
Keillor has said that people often ask him if it is a real town, and when he replied that it was not, they seemed disappointed because "people want stories to be true". So he began to say it was in "central Minnesota, nearStearns County, up aroundHoldingford, not far fromSt. Rosa andAlbany andFreeport, northwest ofSt. Cloud", which he says is "sort of the truth, I guess".[3]
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 The Origins of Lake Wobegon,Garrison Keillor, 8:22, May 14, 2014 |
Keillor has said the town's name comes from a (fictional)Native American word meaning "the place where we waited all day in the rain [for you]." Keillor explains, "Wobegon sounded Indian to me and Minnesota is full of Indian names. They mask the ethnic heritage of the town, which I wanted to do, since it was half Norwegian, half German."[4] The English wordwoebegone means "affected with woe."
Keillor's weekly monologue about Lake Wobegon included recurring elements:[5]
The fictional settlement Lake Wobegon resembles many small farm towns in theUpper Midwest, especially central and westernMinnesota,North Dakota, and to some extent, northernIowa,Wisconsin, easternSouth Dakota and northeasternMontana. These are rural, sparsely populated areas that were settled only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely byhomesteading immigrants fromGermany andScandinavia. One of these,Holdingford, Minnesota, which Keillor said is "most Wobegonic", is onStearns County's Lake Wobegon Regional Trail and advertises itself as the "Gateway to Lake Wobegon", even hosting a "Lake Wobegon Cafe."[6]
Keillor formed most of his ideas for Lake Wobegon while working at public radio stationKSJR[7] on the campus ofSt. John's University inCollegeville, basing it onAvon, where he lived, and other local towns such asAlbany,Freeport,Cold Spring,Richmond,Rockville,St. Joseph,St. Stephen,St. Wendell andHoldingford. Stearns County was predominantlyGerman and Catholic in the 1970s, and the second-most Catholic county in the US (second only toNew Orleans). To balance the religious and ethnic demography ofStearns County with the rest ofMinnesota, Keillor "imported"Lutheran andScandinavian elements into the town, making it more recognizable and therefore more interesting to the rest of the state.
Lake Wobegon is portrayed as theseat of Mist County, Minnesota,[8] a tinycounty near Minnesota's geographic center that supposedly does not appear on maps because of the "incompetence of surveyors who mapped out the state in the 19th century": the surveyors worked inward from the state's boundaries, and when they reached Lake Wobegon, had no room left for it on the map. The town's slogan isGateway to Central Minnesota.[9]Holdingford now has the same slogan.
Lake Wobegon is occasionally said to be nearSt. Olaf, Minnesota, a town referred to in the TV seriesThe Golden Girls. (There is also aSt. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.) The town's school and amateur sports teams compete against theUff-das ofUpsala, a real town in southwestMorrison County, which is close toHoldingford. The town residents drink Wendy's Beer, brewed inSt. Wendel, a real town in northeastStearns County. The nearest good-sized town referred to in Keillor's monologues isSt. Cloud. Lake Wobegon is sometimes compared favorably to a rival fictional town called Millet; a real town calledRice lies 20 miles north of St. Cloud.
Microsoft Virtual Earth returned a location northeast of St. Cloud when Lake Wobegon was entered into its search engine. The programs distributed at live performances ofA Prairie Home Companion in 2005 had a map showing Lake Wobegon about two miles north of Holdingford, northwest of St. Cloud.
Keillor often refers to a cafe in downtown Lake Wobegon called the "Chatterbox Cafe". There was a real cafe and gas station inOlivia by that name, but it is now closed and abandoned, with nothing remaining to identify it but one sign. Olivia is in north-central Renville County.
The Minnesota Rails and Trails project began creating theLake Wobegon Trail in 1998. It now stretches fromWaite Park, Minnesota just west of St. Cloud, toFreeport, Minnesota, where it forks; one trail heads northwest toOsakis, Minnesota, the other northeast toHoldingford, Minnesota andBowlus, Minnesota, and on across theMississippi River. Keillor participated in the trail opening ceremonies and said that Holdingford was the most "Wobegonic" town in his mind.[10] TheLake Wobegon Trail Marathon takes place every year in May on the trail. Runners leave from Holdingford and run toSt. Joseph, Minnesota.
Keillor chronicles a number of bizarre incidents in the fictional town's early history, akin to the events inBlack River Falls inWisconsin Death Trip.
Keillor identifies the original founders of what became Lake Wobegon as New EnglandUnitarian missionaries, at least one of whom came to convert theOjibwe throughinterpretive dance. A college was founded at what was then called New Albion, but the project was abandoned after a severe winter and numerous attacks by bears. The project had only one survivor, a very practical woman who married a French Canadian fur trapper who fed her in exchange for her help with the chores. This pragmatic couple were the founders of the current settlement.
New Albion's founders decided to settle at Lake Wobegon because they had gotten lost and did not know how to get back to where they had last been. To celebrate this, the colony's motto wasUbi Quid Ubi (Latin: "We're Here!...Where are we?"). Later the motto in the Lake Wobegon incorporated town seal is described asSumus Quod Sumus (Latin: "We Are What We Are").
Most of the population are descendants of German immigrants, who are mostly members of theCatholic parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, and descendants of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, who attend Lake WobegonLutheran Church. Keillor's family were members of theSanctified Brethren.
The 800 residents (1950 Census: 728) are proud of theStatue of the Unknown Norwegian (so called because the model left before the sculptor could get his name). Lake Wobegon is in competition with its fictional rival, St. Olaf, for having the most descendants of the same common ancestor. Lake Wobegon became a secret dumping ground of nuclear waste during the 1950s.
The fictional town is the home of theWhippetsbaseball team, tunahotdish, snow,Norwegian bachelor farmers,ice fishing, tongues frozen to cold metal objects, andlutefisk—fish treated with lye which, after being reconstituted, is reminiscent of "the afterbirth of a dog or the world's largest chunk of phlegm."[11] But it is also the home of the Mist County Fair, old-fashioned show yards with flowers "like Las Vegas showgirls", sweet corn, a magnificent grain elevator, and the pleasant lake itself.
The Lake Wobegon effect is a common name for illusory superiority, a natural human tendency to overestimate one's capabilities.[12] The characterization that "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and the children are all above average" has been used to describe a real and pervasive human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others. In one survey of high school students, only 2% of the students reported that they were below average in leadership ability.[13] The authors of a study suggest that what they consider the "Lake Wobegon effect" can in some cases negatively affect doctors' treatment advice when, in planning treatment, doctors portray the patients as "above average".[14]
Keillor himself has offered a contrarian opinion on the use of the term, observing that the effect does not actually apply in Lake Wobegon itself. In response to a listener query on the Prairie Home website, he pointed out that, in keeping with their Scandinavian heritage, Wobegonians prefer to downplay, rather than overestimate, their capabilities or achievements.[15]
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Businesses, organizations, and landmarks in Lake Wobegon include:
Keillor has written several semi-autobiographical books about life in Lake Wobegon, including:
Most of us have moderate to high self-esteem. Like the mythical residents of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon, we need to believe that we are above average. For example, in a survey of a million high school students, only 2 percent stated that they were below average in their leadership ability (Gilovich 1991)
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