Lake Wobegon
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 The Origins of Lake Wobegon, Garrison Keillor, 8:22, May 14, 2014 |
Lake Wobegon is a fictional town created by Garrison Keillor to provide the setting for the long-running radio broadcast, Prairie Home Companion. Lake Wobegon is also the setting for many of Keillor's stories and novels. It is described as a small rural town in central Minnesota, and it is peopled with fictional characters and places, many that have become familiar to listeners of the broadcast. The events and adventures of the imaginary townspeople provide the prolific Keillor with a wealth of stories, that are humorous and at times touching and thoughtful.
Keillor relates that people would often ask him if it were a real town, and his answer that it was fiction seemed to disappoint them, because “people want stories to be true.” So he began to say that it was located in “central Minnesota, near Stearns County, up around Holdingford, not far from St. Rosa and Albany and Freeport, northwest of St. Cloud,” Which he says is “sort of the truth, I guess.”
On the show Keillor says the town's name comes from a fictional old Indian word meaning "the place where we waited all day in the rain [for you]." Keillor explains, "Wobegon sounded Indian to me and Minnesota is full of Indian names. They mask the ethnic heritage of the town, which I wanted to do, since it was half Norwegian, half German." The English word is defined as "affected with woe." The term is a portmanteau of "woe", "be" and "gone".
In Keillor's weekly monologue about "Lake Wobegon", there are recurring monologue descriptions of the town:
Lake Wobegon resembles many small farm towns in the Upper Midwest, especially western Minnesota, North Dakota, and to some extent, northern Iowa, Wisconsin, eastern South Dakota and northeastern Montana. These are rural, sparsely populated areas that were settled only in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, largely by homesteading immigrants from Germany and Scandinavia, especially Norway. One of these, Holdingford, Minnesota, which Keillor said is "most Wobegonic" is on Stearns County's Lake Wobegon Regional Trail, advertises itself as the "Gateway to Lake Wobegon" and even hosts a "Lake Wobegon Cafe."
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