I always like an excuse to link to Strange Maps, which I nominate as the blog with the best comment section ever. My latest excuse is titled “‘More Typical Than Any Real State of the Union’: Sinclair Lewis’s Winnemac.” Unfortunately, this article is not a good example to make my point about the comments section. But I enjoyed it anyway. A better link to the map is here.

I’ve been to Winamac, and a lot of the characters that I blog about knew the historical person known as Winamac.

The Strange Map shows somebody’s interpretation of the location of the state of Winnemac in Sinclair Lewis’s novels. That was interesting in part because I’ve read most of those novels — long ago in high school and college days. My own high school was to the north of Sauk Centre, the Gopher Prairie of Main Street. When the book came out the people of Sauk Centre recognized themselves in the novel and were furious at the way they had been portrayed. But the town eventually had its revenge for Lewis’s portrayal of their bourgeois ways. They took the connection and used it to make some good old bourgeois tourism dollars for the community. As a high school kid I found this all very amusing and ironic, but I don’t know that anyone else thought anything of it. Their high school sports team is even called the Mainstreeters. Unfortunately Sauk Centre was just outside of the area where our school usually played basketball, but I always wanted our teams to meet in the tournaments so I could enjoy the irony some more. I think they did once.

The Strange Maps article points out that Winnemac is named after a Potawatomi leader. Winamac (as it is often spelled) means Catfish. There were two Winamacs who were contemporaries of each other, though. One was pro-American at the time of the War of 1812, and one was very anti. It can be confusing to keep track of which was which. Usually the Potawatomi people would not have given the same name to two different people, but I presume things like this could happen when some of the communities were too far apart to communicate with each other regularly.

On my September 2006 bike ride to the Ten O’Clock Treaty Line, I made a brief visit to Winamac, the county seat of Pulaski County, Indiana. It had taken me two days — over 150 miles of riding — to ride from home to the state park a few miles north of town. Then, because the weather forecast was for rain, we took a couple of days off to spend in Indianapolis, where I did some research at the state library, after which we drove back to the park where I continued the ride. This was my first photo of that ride. Unfortunately this was yet another day of rain, and I didn’t get many photos. I didn’t even get one of Winamac. The above is the closest photo I have, taken not far from the town.

Myra later told me about the time she had spent in Winamac. She had gone to the local Curves establishment for some exercise, and learned that the town had not made up its mind about whether it was adopting daylight savings time or not. Some parts of Indiana had been in a big controversy over whether to join the rest of the world in using DST. The city fathers of Winamac could not agree on what to do. So some clocks in town showed one time, some showed another, and many business places used both.

I admired their spirit and wished I had noticed for myself. I think the town has since become less interesting and has conformed to the rest of the world, though.

By the way, I don’t know which of the Potawatomi leaders the town was named for. I haven’t made much of an effort to find out, but it would be nice to think that the town that couldn’t decide which time zone to use would also be a town that couldn’t decide which Winamac it was named for. Someday I’ll have to find out if that is actually the case.