Lake Wobegon

Lake Wobegon is a fictional town created by Garrison Keillor as the setting of the recurring segment "News from Lake Wobegon" for the radio program A Prairie Home Companion broadcast from Saint Paul, Minnesota. The fictional town serves as the setting for many of Keillor's stories and novels, gaining an international audience with Lake 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.
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, near Stearns County, up around Holdingford, not far from St. Rosa and Albany and Freeport, northwest of St. Cloud", which he says is "sort of the truth, I guess".
Keillor has said the town's name comes from an old 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." The English word woebegone means "affected with woe."
Keillor's weekly monologue about Lake Wobegon included recurring elements:
The fictional settlement Lake Wobegon resembles many small farm towns in the Upper Midwest, especially western Minnesota, North Dakota, and to some extent, northern Iowa, Wisconsin, eastern South Dakota and northeastern Montana. These are rural, sparsely populated areas that were settled only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely by homesteading immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia. One of these, Holdingford, Minnesota, which Keillor said is "most Wobegonic", is on Stearns County's Lake Wobegon Regional Trail and advertises itself as the "Gateway to Lake Wobegon", even hosting a "Lake Wobegon Cafe."
Keillor formed most of his ideas for Lake Wobegon while working at public radio station KSJR on the campus of St. John's University in Collegeville, basing it on Avon, where he lived, and other local towns such as Albany, Freeport, Cold Spring, Richmond, Rockville, St. Joseph, St. Stephen, St. Wendell and Holdingford. Stearns County was predominantly German and Catholic in the 1970s, and the second-most Catholic county in the US (second only to New Orleans). To balance the religious and ethnic demography of Stearns County with the rest of Minnesota, Keillor "imported" Lutheran and Scandinavian elements into the town, making it more recognizable and therefore more interesting to the rest of the state.
Lake Wobegon is portrayed as the seat of Mist County, Minnesota, a tiny county 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 is Gateway to Central Minnesota. Holdingford now has the same slogan.
Lake Wobegon is occasionally said to be near St. Olaf, Minnesota, another fictional town referred to in The Golden Girls television series. (There is actually a St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.) The town's school and amateur sports teams compete against the Uff-das of Upsala, a real town in southwest Morrison County, which is close to Holdingford. The town residents drink Wendy's Beer, brewed in St. Wendel, a real town in northeast Stearns County. The nearest good-sized town referred to in Keillor's monologues is St. Cloud. Lake Wobegon is sometimes compared favorably to a rival fictional town called Millet; a real town called Rice 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 of A 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 in Olivia 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 the Lake Wobegon Trail in 1998. It now stretches from Waite Park, Minnesota just west of St. Cloud, to Freeport, Minnesota, where it forks; one trail heads northwest to Osakis, Minnesota, the other northeast to Holdingford, Minnesota and Bowlus, Minnesota, and on across the Mississippi River. Keillor participated in the trail opening ceremonies and said that Holdingford was the most "Wobegonic" town in his mind. The Lake Wobegon Trail Marathon takes place every year in May on the trail. Runners leave from Holdingford and run to St. Joseph, Minnesota.
Keillor chronicles a number of bizarre incidents in the fictional town's early history, akin to the events in Black River Falls in Wisconsin Death Trip.
Keillor identifies the original founders of what became Lake Wobegon as New England Unitarian missionaries, at least one of whom came to convert the Native American Ojibwe Indians through interpretive 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 was Ubi Quid Ubi (Latin: "We're Here!...Where are we?"). Later the motto in the Lake Wobegon incorporated town seal is described as Sumus Quod Sumus (Latin: "We Are What We Are").
Most of the population are descendants of German immigrants, who are mostly members of the Catholic parish of Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, and descendants of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants, who attend Lake Wobegon Lutheran Church. Keillor's family were members of the Sanctified Brethren.
The 800 residents (1950 Census: 728) are proud of the Statue 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 the Whippets baseball team, tuna hotdish, snow, Norwegian bachelor farmers, ice fishing, tongues frozen to cold metal objects, and lutefisk—fish treated with lye which, after being reconstituted, is reminiscent of "the afterbirth of a dog or the world's largest chunk of phlegm." 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. 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. 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”.
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.
Businesses, organizations, and landmarks in Lake Wobegon include:
Keillor has written several semi-autobiographical books about life in Lake Wobegon, including: