The Palmer House, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street

Sauk Centre's Palmer House Hotel opened in nineteen oh one after fire took the previous hotel. It was modern for its time, the first building in town with electricity, and it catered to traveling salesmen arriving by rail who needed a bed and a drink. A young local named Sinclair Lewis worked two summers at the front desk.

He watched the salesmen, the gossip, the social pressure and provincial conformity of small-town Minnesota, and he remembered everything. In nineteen twenty he published Main Street, a novel set in a fictional town called Gopher Prairie that everyone in Sauk Centre recognized. The book sold one hundred eighty thousand copies in six months, scandalized the town, and eventually helped earn Lewis the Nobel Prize for Literature in nineteen thirty, making him the first American to win it.

The Palmer House still operates today.