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A Giant Pickle Barrel for Teenie Weenie Cartoonist
- Published on Thursday, 14 August 2008 02:03
“Turn right at the Pickle Barrel – you can’t miss it,” were the directions a hotelier in Grand Marais provided to some friends and I who were on our way to his establishment last summer. We figured the barrel was a bar and kept our eyes peeled for its sign. As we approached the corner in question, laughter erupted. The hotelier was right – it was hard to miss. The 20-foot-tall cask occupied a corner lot, surrounded by a well-manicured lawn and garden, like something out of a child’s storybook. Which, in a way, it is.
The life-size pickle barrel was built for Teenie Weenie comic strip creator William Donahey and his wife, Mary Dickerson, also an author and illustrator of children’s books, in 1926 by the Monarch Food Company. Donahey’s Teenie Weenies strip, about a community of little people living under a rosebush, was syndicated by the Chicago Tribune. It ran in the Tribune, and other papers, on and off between 1912 and 1970. In addition to the strip, Donahey’s characters were reproduced in school primers, on trading cards and pencil tins, and appeared in numerous advertisements, including those for Monarch-brand foods. In one of Donahey’s ads, some Teenie Weenies took up residence in…you guessed it…a pickle barrel. This, according to the Grand Marais Historical Society, gave Monarch’s parent company an idea.
The Reid Murdoch Company hired the Pioneer Cooperage Company to build a life-size Pickle Barrel – two barrels, really – in the woods near Grand Sable Lake, where the Donahey couple summered. The larger barrel served as a living area, while a smaller barrel housed the kitchen. A connecting hall doubled as a pantry. The Donaheys’ sleeping quarters and workspaces occupied the second story of the main barrel.
Not surprisingly, the quirky summer cottage drew plenty of onlookers. The Donaheys, in an effort to find some peace, decided to move the Pickle Barrel House into town, where it did subsequent stints as an ice cream stand, souvenir shop and tourist information center. Over time its tenants left, and it fell into disrepair. Until a group of local volunteers coalesced in 2003 and raised enough funds for the Grand Marais Historical Society to purchase the property and barrel from the owner. Grants and donations made the subsequent restoration, including new staves, a new roof, windows and doors and floor, possible, according to Sheri Bates, the society’s treasurer.
Today the Pickle Barrel House is a museum, decorated with linens and curtains, kitchen utensils and even a gas can on the back porch, much as the Donahey summer home once was – at least according to how Mrs. Donahey described it in the book she wrote shortly after moving into the barrel, “A Fairy Story That Came True.”
“We had that as a wonderful guide in furnishing it,” Bates said. The volunteers also scoured eBay for Teenie Weenie memorabilia, of which they found plenty, and a Teenie Weenie enthusiast also shared some of his collection.
The museum, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2004, is open daily in July and August from 1 to 4 p.m., and during the same hours on weekends only in June and September. Volunteer docents take turns in the barrel. Although we were there after closing time last summer, Bates heard that there were some tourists who wanted to take a peek so – in true small-town style – she left her job with a business down the street to show us around.
For more information, visit http://www.grandmaraismichigan.com/Picklebarrel/.
Kim Roth is a freelance writer living in Michigan. She’s written several stories and reviews for Roadside Magazine and keeps her own website at www.out-word.com.