All rights reserved. On the way to see the Dickeyville Grotto, we stopped at Puempel's, the oldest tavern in New Glarus. Puempel's has been a tavern since 1893, with a spectacular cherrywood bar and plenty of beer from the renowned New Glarus brewery on tap. More spectacular still are the murals. Trains cross trestles.
Clouds rise majestically over mountain peaks.
Without the murals, Puempel's would merely be another nice old Wisconsin tavern. With the paintings, however, it is one of the remarkable stops on the art pilgrimage to Dickeyville, a tiny hamlet in the extreme southwestern corner of Wisconsin that is home to the Dickeyville Grotto, an astonishing testament to artistic vision and the power of the individual to move the earth. Stuebin painted the New Glarus murals in 1913. I were a watershed time for folk art in the upper Midwest and Wisconsin in particular. According to Sacred Spaces and Other Places , a book by Lisa Stone and Jim Zanzi, many enormous sculptural environments were built in the period, including the mother of all grotto environments, Fr.