Mainstreet Radio’s Leif Enger profiles Wahkon, a small community at the south end of Lake Mille Lacs, where there is an authentic small-town renewal driven by a combination of optimism and fear.
The story of Wahkon is a familiar one: a few years as a roaring boom town, then decades of slow disintegration. As the 90s began, Wahkon looked like a town that might not make pass the year 2000…but now, a renaissance of sorts is underway with Main street boasting attractive new buildings and a tax base that is rising.
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LEIF ENGER: For years, Wahkon looked like one of those places that would sleep forever. A dwindling village of false fronts, empty windows, quiet sidewalks. Those who live around Mille Lacs know Wahkon used to be the busiest spot on the lake, but few thought it would ever be busy again.
DONNA DANE: It was dead in the shed, so to speak.
LEIF ENGER: Donna Dane was born in Wahkon and never left. Her parents ran a resort and launch service on Mille Lacs. And she grew up to teach at the local school.
In those days, Lake Mille Lacs was just being discovered by people from the Twin Cities and elsewhere who wanted a cheap, close fishing vacation. The walleye were plentiful. Dane's father routinely offered his launch customers their money back if they didn't catch their limit. And for a short time, Wahkon became the commercial centerpiece of the lake.
DONNA DANE: We had a restaurant right across the road from where I live. We had a bank, a lumber yard. We had at one time a battery factory up on the end. We had the biggest hotel at one time between here and Minneapolis, the Rex Hotel.
LEIF ENGER: But Wahkon's prosperity didn't hold. The Rex Hotel burned, lumbering, diminished. And other industry leaked away to neighboring towns like Isle and Onamia.
After the school closed, Wahkon entered a long hibernation. It began to stir again about three years ago. A car wash opened, Wahkon's first new business in 40 years.
Then a log home contractor built a new office in town. When other businesses started up, a restaurant, a gift shop, a general store, they hired the contractor. Now Wahkon looks awake like a life-size Lincoln Log town.
(SINGING) Baby, baby
Don't ever leave me again
LEIF ENGER: Dale [? Sevten, ?] a former trucker who opened Muggs Saloon two years ago, says business has been surprisingly good. He expresses what's become a common vision in Wahkon of a future full of quaint log shops and prosperous tourists.
SPEAKER: If you've got one business, nobody's going to come to see one. But if you've got 10. So there's things to walk from place to place, like [INAUDIBLE] up in Brainerd. That's-- people just go there just to wander around.
LEIF ENGER: [? Sevten ?] and others just shrug when asked to explain the resurrected Wahkon. A few new people have moved in. A few natives have returned.
A newspaper in the next town summed it up as a series of happy accidents. There is a conspicuous reluctance to credit the nearby casino built by the Mille Lacs Ojibwe Band, though it employs 1,200 and has been an economic engine for much of the area. City clerk Karrie Roeschlein says the casino may have helped, but that's overshadowed by fears about the band claim on fishing rights to Mille Lacs.
KARRIE ROESCHLEIN: I think what's scaring a lot of the old timers, or even the new timers, is that what might we lose. There won't be as many people coming up to fish. It's been stated through just individuals that's been, I think, in surveys that-- people just won't think there's enough fish when there's commercial fishing and netting like that. And personally, I think the citizens in the area will be in an uproar. And I'm really nervous about as far as how far that will go.
LEIF ENGER: There's plenty of nervousness in Wahkon, in fact, even as the town continues to grow. The treaty rights issue isn't settled yet. So no one really knows what effect the band's fishing will have.
But the group headed by Bud Grant, to oppose the band, has posters and collection points all over town. There's also nervousness that the band will continue to buy up land, put it in trust, and take it off the Mille Lacs County tax rolls. Fred Main, the log home contractor who's built many of the new businesses in Wahkon, says all this uncertainty is getting expensive.
FRED MAIN: Well, I've got six individuals that we're going to build in Mille Lacs County. But they've asked for their deposits back because of all the unrest that's in the county right now. Lake issues, the taxes, the tax base.
LEIF ENGER: Main was one of the organizers of a recent unsuccessful bid to start a new non-Indian casino in Mille Lacs County. Like many residents, he assumes the tourist trade will dry up if the band begins commercial fishing. That's why the new businesses here aren't resorts or bait shops. They're designed, Main says, to survive the death of local sportfishing and to bring a new type of tourist to Lake Mille Lacs.
FRED MAIN: Especially where I'm from in California, you can drive all around California and see little towns that were dying. And all of a sudden, they created something special about themselves, and they're back on the map again. And this is what we're trying to accomplish here because face it. If fishing goes, what have we got left?
LEIF ENGER: Construction will start this spring on Wahkon's newest log attraction, a complex of small shops and cafes downtown. Leif Enger, Main Street Radio.