Mount Horeb, Wisconsin

Norwegian heritage is alive in this magical southwestern Wisconsin town
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Wisconsin Trails, March-April 2002
Gone for the Weekend, Spring/Summer Travel Guide
Photos: Kortney Kaiser

In Norwegian legend, trolls guard hidden treasures. On visiting Mt. Horeb, a tiny hilltop burg perched just within Wisconsin’s rugged Driftless Region, I figured out the secret to its improbably dense cluster of unique attractions: the place is protected by trolls.

How else to explain, for instance, Cave of the Mounds a few miles away? Discovered in 1939 by miners quarrying for gravel, the cave is a miraculous trove of geologic splendors millions of years old. By rights it should’ve been demolished 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age—but the glaciers stopped just short. “Any cave in other parts of Wisconsin would’ve been crushed,” Joe Klimczak, who manages the cave’s tourist operations with his wife, Anne Wescott, tells me. “The glaciers really scoured the earth flat.” Joe lets drop that trolls, celebrated in sign and sculpture everywhere in and around Mt. Horeb, have a special affinity for minerals.

So it was trolls who kept this spectacular cache safe and hidden.

As we walk underground, where it’s a comfy 50 degrees year-round, Joe switches various lights on and off. A stalactite appears, slowly dripping water onto a point of rock. Each back-lit drop explodes into a sparkling pompon of light and color. Joe makes other formations appear and disappear: hollow “soda straws,” a painted waterfall, strips of bacon, coral.

Though not as large as some other tourist-accessible caves, this has more variety of shape and color than most. “It’s remarkably decorated,” Joe tells me. “It looks like an artist painted it—minerals like iron oxide and manganese give the different colors.” Then the former electrical engineer uses a term I’ll hear often around Mt. Horeb: “It’s a magical place.”

Cave of the Mounds is located on the 1828 homestead of Ebenezer Brigham, the first white settler in Dane County. Brigham owned the pair of limestone peaks known as the Blue Mounds. His descendants still own the cave and some surrounding East Mound land. Most of this mound is now Brigham County Park, which offers camping, hiking trails, and scenic views. The West Mound is the site of Blue Mound State Park, home to the state park system’s only Olympic-size swimming pool.

At the park, the splashes and squeals of children slip away as I start along a narrow, hilly path winding among huge, green-patched boulders. The day is hot, but the woods are cool, dark, green. At the top of the mound I leave the solitude of the forest to join the groups of people who’ve driven to the upper parking lot to climb the wooden lookout tower and behold, through this day’s blue haze, a colorful, hilly vista of farms and forests. Thanks to the trolls who protected the Blue Mounds from destruction by glacier, this is the highest point in southern Wisconsin.

In a tiny wooded valley nearby, I explore Little Norway, a living history museum patterned after the outdoor museums of Norway. There a guided tour takes visitors through furnished farm buildings: a storage house on stilts, a sod-roofed cabin, a spring house, more.

Once a Norwegian farmstead, in 1927 Little Norway was purchased as a summer retreat. Isak Dahle, a Chicago businessman who grew up in Mt. Horeb, restored the traditional Norwegian farmhouse buildings on the property. He had the furniture and buildings decorated according to Norwegian custom, with paints and carvings. “He was a third generation Norwegian who felt he’d lost his heritage,” says manager Scott Winner, a great-grand-nephew of Dahle. “He recreated the place for his family, not for public display.”

In 1935, Dahle added the Norway Building. This ornate wooden structure, patterned after ancient Norwegian churches and using Viking motifs, was originally built in Norway for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

News of the farmstead and its treasures spread, and people began showing up to see it. “He’d come to visit, and there’d be people walking in buildings, looking in drawers.” Little Norway officially opened to the public soon after.

“This is a place time has forgotten,” Scott says, “The magic here is really special.” Little Norway’s other name is Nissedahle, or “Valley of the Elves.” And there are trolls here, too: wooden carvings by local artist Mike Feeney dot the landscape, part of the Mt. Horeb “Trollway.”

Most of Feeney’s statues are downtown, along Main Street, where, though it’s only 20 miles southwest of Madison and just off a major highway, Mt. Horeb feels like a remote getaway.

Driving westward on 18-151, I pass the site of the original town center at the intersection with 78. Centered around the meeting spot of several roads, the community was once known as “The Corners.” During the Civil War, Norwegian immigrants began calling the place “Stangjii,” or Liberty Pole. Today, long-established local businesses line what was once a military road to the Mississippi: Yapp’s Antiques in a boxy old brick building, the Danish-modern Karakahl Motor Inn. Cheerfully appointed Victorian manses house gift and antique shops.

Soon I reach “New Town,” the heart of Mt. Horeb’s commercial district. When the railway sited a depot here in 1881, businesses relocated and used the name once given to the post office at the nearby farm of a Methodist Episcopal minister (Mt. Horeb is where Moses saw the burning bush). Downtown is a comfortable jumble of old and new: 19th and early 20th century storefronts—some slickly renovated—and modern structures. Particularly striking, in an offbeat way, is the mid-century Mount Horeb Telephone Company building adorned with giant Viking-themed motifs: a horned cap, a ship. Across the street, Dick’s Market, a homey grocery store seemingly out of a Norwegian spin-off of Mayberry RFD, sells homemade brats, jerky and lefse, a sort of Norwegian potato tortilla. Dick tells me, with a jolly smile, that he ships lefse all over the country at Christmas time. Does he advertise? Does he have a Web site? No. How do people find out about him? “Beats me,” he says with a shrug.

Downtown bustles, but somehow I can always find a parking spot right in front of the shop I’m headed for. I chalk it up to trolls.

Though it’s only 20 miles southwest of Madison, just off a major highway, Mt. Horeb feels like a remote getaway. As well as boasting a fine array of gift shops and eateries, Mt. Horeb is an antique shopper’s paradise, with over 100 dealers represented in its many storefronts and antique malls. Wares range from high-ticket items like jewelry and fine refinished furniture to collectibles like glassware and old kitchen tools.

Also on Main Street is the quirky Mount Horeb Mustard Museum (see related article in this issue's State Talk), which displays antique mustard memorabilia and sells thousands of varieties of mustards from around the world; every one is available for a taste test.

A few blocks off Main Street. I visit the house where Isak Dahle, Little Norway’s founder, grew up. Built in 1908 by his father, U.S. Congressman Herman B. Dahle, this graceful Victorian home with unusual neoclassical and mission-style elements is soon to enter the National Register of Historic Places, thanks to the efforts of its newest owners, Don and Peggy Donaldson from Naperville, Ill. In 2001, they renovated the house and opened it for business as the Arbor Rose Bed & Breakfast. Fortunately, Peggy says, the Dahle house was treated well through the years. “Every piece of hardware matches—doorknobs, window pulls, everything. We feel so privileged to be here. It’s not just our house—it belongs to the whole community.”

Before giving me a tour of the rose-themed B&B rooms upstairs—cozy antique-furnished rooms, a step-up 4-poster canopy bed, a shady upstairs porch—the Donaldsons ply me with homemade sweet treats and coffee. Peggy tells me about her trademark apricot-glazed Arbor Rose rolls, which rise overnight in a fruity almond sauce. “They’re gooey, but good,” Peggy says. “I usually share recipes, but this one, I’m keeping secret.”

A winding ride from the center of town through Stewart County Park takes me to another B&B: Othala Valley Inn, a cozy, Norwegian-style limestone lodge on an 80-acre organic farm. Farmer/innkeepers Linda Derrickson and Mark Kessenich set out a mini smorgasbord, all grown on the premises or crafted by neighboring artisans. Dane County Farmers Market fans will recognize these names: Bleu Mont cheese, Cress Springs Bakery bread, Gentle Breeze honey. “We produce what we can here, and support local growers,” says Linda. The sausages are made from the hardy Highland cattle that Linda and Mark raise. Mark gives me a tour of the farm, and I get to meet chickens, ducks, and a small flock of Jacob sheep.

Linda explains how they chose this dappled, four-horned breed, which look much like goats to the neophyte (me): “We wanted delicious meat and great fleece. Plus, we like the horns.” They’re attractively curved, and, says Linda, “Horns act like antennae—they bring in good energy.”

At dawn, I watch from my enormous bed as the valley slowly fills with light. The birches light up first: glowing, dappled white rods. Rocks poke out in places from the impossibly steep hillside. I remember Linda’s telephone description of the valley: “It’s magic here.”

Many of Othala’s furnishings are Norwegian antiques. “We collected these for years, not knowing what we’d ever do with them,” says Linda. In the living room near the huge fireplace, she shows me a print hanging prominently among the books and games. “I put this up on a whim at first,” she says. “Didn’t really think about it. But one of our guests was all excited when she saw it. Seems it’s a real find.”

I take a look. Long, bushy tails, four fingers on each hand, big, warty noses, patched clothes: it’s a family of trolls.

Vesna Vuynovich Kovach is editor in chief of Erickson Publishing, a Madison-based company which produces niche publications and events celebrating the people and places of Wisconsin.

WHERE TO STAY
ARBOR ROSE BED & BREAKFAST—$85-$125. (608) 437-1108 or ArborRoseBandB@aol.com.

OTHALA VALLEY INN B&B—$65-$120. 3192 County Hwy JG, Mt. Horeb. (608) 437-2141 or www.othalavalley.com.

WHERE TO DINE
SCHUBERT’S OLD FASHIONED CAFE AND BAKERY—[Now defunct -VVK, 2006] Step back in time in this retro luncheonette with its classic soda fountain. Try the delicately seasoned Norwegian meatballs. Bakery specialties include lefse, rosettes and Swedish rye bread with a lovely, light, even texture. 126 E. Main St. (608) 437-3393.

THE GRUMPY TROLL BREWPUB—Great burgers, excellent beers in a former Swiss cheese factory. Try the five-beer sampler for $3.75. Troll’s Beer & Cheese soup is delightful. 105 S. Second St. (608) 437-BREW or www.grumpytroll.com.

MT. HOREB MAIN STREET PUB AND GRILL—Official pub of the Mustard Museum; ask for the free sampler basket. Famous burgers, meat fresh ground daily at Dick’s Market across the street. Wisconsin beers on tap. Friday fish fry, Saturday prime rib. Sugar River Euchre League, in its 75th year, meets Saturdays, 6 a.m. More euchre Saturday evenings. 120 E. Main St. (608) 437-5733.

WHAT TO DO
GENERAL INFORMATION—The Mt. Horeb Area Chamber of Commerce can provide maps, event listings and guides to antique dealers. (608) 437-5914, 1-88-TROLLWAY (1-888-765-5929) or www.trollway.com.

LITTLE NORWAY—$8. Open May through October. Cave of the Mounds Road exit from State Highway 18-151. (608) 437-8211 or littlenorway.com.

CAVE OF THE MOUNDS—Adults $12; children 5-12 $3. Open daily March through Nov. 15, weekends Nov. 15 through March 15. . Cave of the Mounds Road exit from State Highway 18-151. (608) 437-3038 or caveofthemounds.com.

MT. HOREB MUSTARD MUSEUM—Open daily. 100 E. Main St. (608) 438-6878 or www.mustardmuseum.com.

MT. HOREB AREA MUSEUM—A first-rate presentation of ethnic evolution. Highlights include a restored grocery store. Gift shop. Fridays and Saturdays, 10 a.m.-5p.m., Sundays 12:30-5 p.m. Free. 100 S. Second St., Mt. Horeb. (608) 437-6486 or www.mounthoreb.org/museum.htm.

MILITARY RIDGE STATE TRAIL—This 40-mile biking and hiking converted rail bed connecting Fitchburg to Dodgeville runs right through Mt. Horeb. Buy bike trail passes in town or stop here for a bite. Camping near trail in Blue Mound State Park. (608) 437-7393.

TYROL BASIN SKI AREA—Mountain bike trails through woods and hayfields. Summer Snow-Fest draws snowboarders and freestyle skiers from around the country. June 1-2 (weather permitting). 3487 Bohn Road, Mt. Horeb. (608) 437-4135 or www.tyrolbasin.com.

Aztalan: Where time hangs still

By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach
In Wisconsin Trails
March-April 2001

At the dawn of the last millennium, Wisconsin’s first agricultural community was born. It happened on a special spot, a place where the woods opened onto a narrow oak savanna that ran along the west bank of a plentiful river. A shoulder of high ground protected this fertile expanse from winter’s fierce west winds. Here, a group of Native Americans planted a cornfield, and built a town beside it. They raised massive earthworks: platform-topped mounds for performing the ceremonies to make the corn grow, for storing the corn, and for burning and burying some of the most honored of the dead. The town they surrounded with stockade walls, tall and sturdy—though some of their neighbors were friends, they fought with others. For besides being farmer-warriors, they were pioneers on the north frontier of their world. No one else lived like this up here, and no one else ever would.

Today, the site is a park deep in the Jefferson County countryside, midway between Milwaukee and Madison. A mile off the easy-biking Glacial Drumlin Trail, Aztalan State Park offers tranquil fishing and picnicking on the west bank of the Crawfish River, a few miles north of its confluence with the Rock. Amenities are few: some tables and grills, pit toilets. Hand pumps deliver water, cold with the taste of iron, to anyone energetic enough to swing a long, heavy lever long enough to start the flow. There’s no visitors center or park office. You wouldn’t guess this is the home of the state’s most spectacular archeological treasure.

Just north of the picnic tables a narrow green field stretches parallel to the river. At three of the field’s four corners, grassy mounds swoop up, each some 15 feet high. One of these is a natural gravel knoll, where archeologists think the ancients may have held ceremonies. The other two are earthworks carefully reconstructed by archeologists in the 1950s: a stepped pyramid and a flat-topped dome. For the untrained eye looking out at these 21 peaceful acres, it’s hard to imagine the bustle of activity that once filled this space—farming, cooking, playing, ritual, battle.

A steep stairway leads up the pyramid in the southwest corner. Pits within it stored corn. The top level, a 53 square foot platform, was originally capped with smooth clay. Archeologists think it was used for rituals commemorating the harvest, and as a spot where Aztalan’s elite could look out over the town. Lengths of stockade wall (also rebuilt in the 1950s) rim this part of the park. From here looking east to the knoll some 700 feet away, and northwards nearly one quarter mile to the mound at Aztalan’s northwest corner, both appear quite near. But walking north, the grass slips by beneath your feet, your footsteps taking you so slowly to that mound, always just ahead, never seeming to get closer. By the time you climb the north mound, where hundreds of years ago a structure was built, ten bodies and a bundle of bones were lined up inside, and the whole thing was burned and then buried, you might feel that time hangs still in the air, and that all the people who dwelled here before are not so far away after all.

The walled village of Aztalan thrived from about A.D. 1000 to 1200, with about 350 residents at its peak. Not until the nineteenth century would Wisconsin again be home to such a concentrated population. Aztalan wasn’t the only town of its kind, but there was nothing else like it so far north. It was a frontier town, the northernmost major outpost of the Middle Mississippian culture, which was a vast society headquartered in what’s now Illinois, across the Mississippi from present-day St. Louis.

The Middle Mississippian culture owed its start to corn agriculture. Corn, first cultivated in Mesoamerica, sparked a cultural revolution when it arrived in the Illinois region around A.D. 800. Unlike wild grains, domesticated corn was relatively easy to plant, harvest, and eat, and it produced lots of big, nutritious seed. In the fertile Mississippi floodplain, harvests were abundant. With plenty to eat, mortality declined and the population soared. Change came fast: tending fields and storing the harvest meant settling down and giving up nomadic ways. The society began to split into strict castes. Rulers controlled the resources that others grew, crafted, and traded for. Arts and religion flourished, as did large-scale, elaborate human sacrifice rituals. At the center of this new society was Cahokia, a metropolis over five miles square, complete with its own constellation of suburbs. At its zenith, around A.D. 1150, Cahokia was one of the largest cities in the world. With 10,000 residents, it was more populous than London at that time. The new Middle Mississippian culture spread through much of what’s now the United States. Some scholars describe Cahokia (its original name is unknown to us; it was renamed in the 19th century for a Native American tribe living near its ruins), with its enormous influence, as the seat of a Native American empire.

Aztalan was typically Middle Mississippian in many ways, with its stockade walls, ceremonial platform mounds, ruling elite, elegantly decorated shell-tempered pottery, sturdy huts of varied shapes and styles, many types of complex burials, and its evidently brutal warfare. And, as at Cahokia, Aztalan life depended on intensive cultivation of corn. But around 1200, both Cahokia and Aztalan began to wither. In fact, the Middle Mississippian culture vanished entirely from the Midwest, and archeologists still aren’t sure why. In the American Southeast, Middle Mississippian lifeways continued for centuries—though never on Cahokia’s scale—right up into the 16th century and European contact. In the region that became Wisconsin, a new culture developed: that of the Oneota, ancestors of many modern tribes including the Ho-Chunk. The Oneota farmed and lived in permanent settlements, but on a smaller, less concentrated scale than Aztalan. Whether they descended from the people of Aztalan is unknown, but Aztalan culture certainly influenced them.

Meanwhile, by the banks of the Crawfish River, the town languished, abandoned, for six hundred years. Occasional prairie fires blackened the stockade walls. Wide piles of rubble gradually formed along the walls, as the tough plaster slowly crumbled and sloughed away.

In 1835, settler Timothy Johnson came upon the ruins of a mysterious civilization three days’ rugged travel from Milwaukee, in the newly formed Wisconsin Territory Newspapers across the country publicized the find. Adventurers sought out the storied city in the wilderness. They wrote of a “Citadel”—a weathered fortress four to five feet tall, surrounding the remains of a town. Within the walls they saw great platform mounds and dozens of house foundations dug into the ground, the hearth pits still visible. Outside the enclosure was the ancient cornfield and dozens of smaller mounds. Wrote Nathaniel Hyer, a Milwaukee judge who put an early claim on the land, “We found the Ruins...in a much more perfect state than I had anticipated.”

Like most of his fellow settlers, Hyer thought Wisconsin Indians were much too primitive to be related to the town’s builders. He concluded these must be the ruins of “Aztalan,” the legendary northern source of the Aztec people (which today’s scientists think is about as far north as New Mexico). Hyer reasoned that the Aztecs were “far more advanced in civilization and the arts, than the Indian race ever appear to have been.” The name stuck, though some of Hyer’s contemporaries believed the town was actually built by the Lost Tribes of Israel, ancient Phoenicians, or refugees from Atlantis. At any rate, the “Citadel” was taken as proof that the Indians must be dispatched. The barbarians of the Wisconsin Territory weren’t natives, but usurpers who’d murdered a civilized “Lost Race.” The settlers were acting justly: reclaiming the land for civilization.

In those days before modern archeological methods, exploration was, to say the least, destructive. Curiosity-seekers tore apart the walls and mounds freely, and helped themselves to what they found. One 1838 visitor wrote that he “cut through the wall in several places” and opened several mounds with spade and pick, making a gift to a friend of something he considered a particularly tantalizing find: one of about 52 bundles of forearm bones, charred and bound with fibrous cord. Soon, despite Aztalan’s fame, the site was parceled off as farmland. Edward Everett, a well-known orator of the time, entreated President Van Buren to protect the site. His request went unanswered, and the ancient village—mounds, house foundations, and all—went under the plow. As years went by, countless bones and artifacts were tossed to the sides of the fields like pesky stones, or were taken by souvenir hunters. And the stockade walls, so marvelously intact? Wagonloads of this “Aztalan brick” went to fill potholes in the local roads.

Aztalan’s fortunes improved around 1920 when Samuel Barrett, one of America’s first professional archeologists, began conducting scientific excavations there. In support of his work, the townspeople of modern Aztalan rallied to save what remained of the ancient site. They raised money to buy the land and lobbied for years to make it a national or state park. Finally, in 1948, Aztalan became a state park. It was designated a National Landmark in 1964.

Among archeologists today, interest in Aztalan is keener than ever before, thanks in part to the many intriguing finds made over years of fieldwork. For every question raised, different researchers suggest different answers. Who were the Aztalanians? Some archeologists believe they were exiles or political refugees from Cahokia. Others think they were traders who eventually settled in—Cahokians who came to Wisconsin to trade for deer meat and hide. A more grisly suggestion: they were trading for human fodder to supply Cahokia’s large-scale sacrifices. Some scholars believe that Middle Mississippians chose this particular spot because the locale reminded them of the waterways of their home in what’s now Illinois. Others think that most, if not all, of the Aztalan residents were natives to the Wisconsin region. Much Wisconsin-style pottery has been found at the site, and there’s even evidence of some corn agriculture starting around A.D. 800. After learning of Cahokia through trade and travel, by this theory, these local farmers built themselves a mini-Cahokia.

So why was the town abandoned? Weather and warfare seem the most likely reasons. Both Aztalan and Cahokia declined after about A.D. 1200, during a worldwide cold spell. Aztalan and Cahokia may have depended on a type of corn that did better in warmer conditions—and indeed, the Middle Mississippian culture continued in the warmer American Southeast for centuries. Alternately, warfare may have been the main factor in Aztalan’s demise. Maybe neighboring Oneota warriors crushed Aztalan. Or, as some researchers speculate, maybe the villagers tired of their restrictive, caste-driven life and evolved into what became Oneota.

Another puzzle: the apparently cannibalized bones found charred and broken in the town dump. Did the Aztalanians rely on human flesh as food, as some scientists believe? Or, as others say, was their cannibalism was strictly ritualistic, a form of ancestor veneration? Was it a way to gain the strength of vanquished enemies? Or, by still another hypothesis, were the trashed bones were simply body parts deemed unworthy of proper burial?

The answers will never be known for sure. But because of the many people who’ve worked to preserve the relics of this vanished world, we can explore these mysteries together at Aztalan, Wisconsin’s first farm town.

The rich history of Wisconsin continues to fascinate freelance writer Vesna Vuynovich Kovach, an East Coast transplant since 1992.



Visiting Aztalan
By Vesna Vuynovich Kovach

Aztalan State Park is located on Highway Q outside Lake Mills. From I-94, take Highway 89 south into Lake Mills. Turn east onto County B. After 2.5 miles, turn right on County Q. Or, if you’re biking the Glacial Drumlin Trail, leave the trail at Q. The park is about a mile north of the trail. This scenic bike path, which runs almost the entire distance from Madison to Milwaukee, features easy riding and many entry points along its 52 miles of converted rail bed. Call the Lake Mills trail office at (920) 648-8774 for a trail map and bike rentals, or visit www.glacialdrumlin.com. The Sandhill Station State Campground is a mile south of the Lake Mills trail office.

The park itself is sparsely signed, but a self-guiding tour brochure introduces Aztalan culture and history, points out where some of the most interesting burials and artifacts were found, and shows the whereabouts of the ancient town’s main features. The tour takes about an hour. The day-use park offers picnic tables and grills, fishing, hiking along the river, and cross-country skiing. Dogs must be leashed and kept in designated areas, out of the village grounds. Visitors can freely explore the grass-covered site and climb the rebuilt temple mounds. But before you pack the kids and car, note that no trails lead through the town site—meaning no access for strollers or wheelchairs. Call Dana White-Quam, the DNR’s park and recreation expert for the South Central Region, at (608) 275-3302 to find out about scheduled hikes and other programming. This summer, you might even get to witness a live archeological dig.

Right now, Aztalan’s interpretive facilities are slim, but that’s soon to change. A new master plan for the park calls for a visitor center featuring an auditorium, audio-visual presentations, displays, classrooms, and space for archeologists to conduct ongoing research. Pending funding and other logistics, the center will be built within the next three to 15 years. Call White-Quam for more information.

Aztalan Historical Museum, just outside the park on Q, celebrates the history of both the pioneer town and its prehistoric predecessor. The museum features artifacts from ancient Aztalan, as well as several 19th century buildings: a one-room schoolhouse, a church, period-furnished pioneer homes and a two-story barn. Though the museum grounds aren’t part of the state park, some Aztalan mounds are located here. One of these, a conical mound originally 50 feet across and six feet high, held an elaborate burial unique in Wisconsin: a young woman wrapped about the shoulders, waist, and knees with three shrouds woven with nearly two thousand shell beads. Robert Birmingham, state archeologist with the State Historical Society, thinks this woman may have been the most important chieftain in Aztalan’s history. At the time of European contact, says Birmingham, female chieftains ruled in parts of the Middle Mississippian culture’s last stronghold, the American Southeast. A statue offering an alternate interpretation of the woman as a priestess is slated for unveiling on the museum grounds this spring. Museum hours are Thursday through Sunday, noon to 4 p.m., May 17 - September 30. Call (920) 648-4632 for group tours.

After your expedition, head for the homey eateries of nearby Lake Mills. Downtown at 131 N. Main Street, look for a pyramid-shaped roof: that’s the Cafe on the Park (formerly the Pyramid Cafe), styled in tribute to the earthworks of Aztalan. Slake your thirst at the outdoor beer garden at Tyranena Brewing Company on 1025 Owen Street. Tyranena is named after the supposed “stone teepees” (they’re actually natural rock deposits) submerged in Rock Lake across town. Call (920) 648-8699 for beer garden hours; brewery tours given Saturdays at 3:30.