The year the magazines called us cool.

Our friends down the street at the Wall Street Gallery & Bistro handed us a folder the other day. Inside were a few yellowed newspaper pages, carefully kept, from the autumn of 2008. We spread them out on the counter and lost a good half hour to them.

Here is the short version, for those who did not live it. In September of 2008, Budget Travel magazine named Mazomanie one of the ten coolest small towns in America. Not the prettiest, not the oldest. The coolest. The Chicago Sun-Times ran a full travel feature under the headline "Small Town Cool." The Associated Press sent it out to papers across the country under a gentler one: "Reawakened village honors its past." A village of about fifteen hundred people, forty minutes from Madison, suddenly turning up in the Sunday travel section between Toronto and the Wisconsin Dells.

The word that kept coming up in those articles was reawakened, and it is the right one. Because the Mazomanie those writers described in 2008 was not the Mazomanie of twenty years before. In the early 1990s a good many of these brick storefronts sat empty and tired, the way Main Streets all over the country sat empty and tired.

What changed was people. In 1992, Dan and Nancy Viste bought the old feed mill, of all things, and turned it into a restaurant. Dan was a hydrogeologist by training, which is to say he knew a great deal about water and had to learn the rest as he went. They did not stop at the mill. Over the years they bought and restored eleven more historic buildings. A decade later, in 2006, the sculptor Bob Brumley started the Iron Horse Gallery as a cooperative of five local artists. By the time the magazines showed up it had grown to seventeen. Thirty-three buildings in town landed on the National Register of Historic Places. One person fixed a mill, another gathered the artists, and a whole village woke up.

A couple of things in those clippings made us grin. The town is named for a Wahpeton chief, and the name is usually translated as "Walking Iron," or "Iron Horse." So the railroad that built this place in 1855 arrived in a town already named, in a manner of speaking, for the train. We did not make that up to sell coffee. It was true a century before we got here, and it is the reason an iron horse keeps turning up in the corners of this website.

And here is the one that stopped us cold: in 1882, five brothers gave their very first public performance right here in Mazomanie. You have heard of them. A few years later the Ringling Brothers were the greatest circus on earth. It started as a modest concert in a small Wisconsin town, a few doors from where your coffee is being poured.

Mazomanie has always been a town that contains more than it lets on. It keeps a few of its chapters the way it keeps everything good, quietly, and best discovered in person from someone who was around for them. Ask a local about the sign out on the county highway sometime. They will smile before they answer.

We are, we suppose, a small part of the current chapter. Another old building brought back, another set of doors open on Brodhead Street. When Budget Travel called this village reawakened, the coffee house in the old bank had not been dreamed up yet. We like to think we are keeping the pot warm for whatever wakes up next.

Thank you to the Gallery for the clippings. Good clippings deserve a wall, so we gave them one here. Fold marks and all.

The wall

Tap any clipping to read it full size.

The 1855 crew

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