Friday, July 29, 2011

Little Log House on the Prairie

It turns out there's a multi-acre roadside attraction I had never heard of only a few dozen miles from the Twin Cities. Little Log House Pioneer Village is on the outskirts of Hastings, a Mississippi River town on the border of Minnesota and Wisconsin. It's owned by Steve and Sylvia Bauer, two people with a large-scale yen to collect.

Little Log House sign on an antique harvesting machine
This is the building that started it all:

1857 log cabin, the Grinstad House
Steve was helping a friend demolish a house back in 1987, when he realized it was actually an old log cabin. So instead of destroying it, he took it apart, moved it to his 160-acre farm, and rebuilt it.

Adjacent to the little log house is the somewhat larger Hall House:

Pink italianate mansard-roofed Victorian house
It's a funny little house, and I do mean little. It's about half the size you would think, based on its appearance. (The one-story log house is in the background, giving a sense of it -- the Hall House is only a story and a half, plus the cupola.)

Side view of the Hall House, showing the cupola
The Hall House was originally built in 1884 in Zumbrota, Minnesota, and was moved in five pieces to the Pioneer Village in 2000. I don't know why it was moved -- was it threatened with demolition? I assume so, since it was the only building in Zumbrota that was on the National Register of Historic Places. I would hope the only reason it was moved was that there was no other solution.

The Hall House is surrounded by a beautiful garden, designed by Sylvia Bauer. It extends to several other buildings nearby, including a shady hosta glade that was about 10 degrees cooler than anywhere else on the site.

Pure gas sign and other old gasoline signs on an old gas station
Pioneer Village has a nice collection of petroliana, but one of the coolest things is a miniature replica of the Hastings spiral bridge, which was torn down in 1951:

Wooden and iron bridge with a spiral ramp
Yes, there used to be a bridge in Hastings that required drivers to navigate a tight spiral before reaching the main span.

Spiral bridge ramp reaching to main span
I think the bridge is about half size, but I could be completely wrong about that.

The reason I heard about Pioneer Village is because it was in the local news recently, when Porky's, a St. Paul landmark drive-in, closed. Porky's was the epicenter of University Avenue's classic car culture; even recently, on Saturdays you would see street rods mixing with classic 1950s cars. The Bauers bought it and moved it down to the Pioneer Village; the incredible signs were sold to someone else, though.

Here's a photo of what it looked like not long before the move (from the City Pages blog):

Porky's drive in
And there it was -- with only miniature recreations of its classic signs, and repainted a bit more brightly, but it was the same Porky's.

Yellow and dark brown checkered drive in restaurant with Porky's light bulb sign on the side
The only problem with Little Log House Pioneer Village as a roadside attraction is that it isn't open to the public except on the last weekend in July, when they hold the Antique Power Show, with tractor pulls, a flea market, music and a lot more. I stopped in on the set-up day, and they let me wander around. The spiral bridge and the Hall House can be seen pretty well from the road, but it was really nice to be able to wander through the garden and see everything up close.

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