Location(s)

What you choose to do between Spring Valley and Rushford is up to you, but the drive through southeastern Minnesota’s bluff country can take a weekend to complete. The Root River State Trail links 41 miles of land between Fillmore and Houston counties and runs alongside State Highway 16, one of the best drives in the state.

Yet aside from scenery and outdoor recreation, the area boasts of some of the best historic preservation efforts around, with old courthouses, laundries, village halls and churches now housing museums, antique shops and restaurants.

Highway 16 links about a dozen towns that, together, have more charm than any other region in the state. A magnificent trout stream meanders along one of the prettiest drives in Minnesota, cutting through bluffs thick with vegetation and limestone palisades.

Traces of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the founder of Sears, Roebuck & Co. and the possible inventor if the stapler can all be found in the 124-year-old Spring Valley Methodist Church. Almanzo and Laura attended church there in 1890-91. The museum’s two floors of exhibits include a Wilder photo display, Richard Sears exhibit, what was believed to be an electric cure for arthritis, chicken catcher and human hair wreaths from 1900. Yes, human hair.

Across the street, the Washburn-Zittleman House Museum is a 10-room, two-story house built in 1865. It features a parlor, sunken bedroom and costume room. It’s part of the city’s museum complex of four restored buildings.

Tiny Wykoff has little to see or do, but the former city jail has become the historic Wykoff Jail Haus Bed and Breakfast, a diminutive brick structure north of town. It includes an antenna for better TV reception – just like today’s real prisoners.

He was the town’s self-appointed collector of Wykoff memorabilia. Ed Krueger developed the Jack Sprat grocery store in 1933. Stop by Ed’s Museum and Living Quarters on the way out of town.

Visitors to Wykoff see history alive – much like they do in the other towns from Spring Valley to Rushford. It’s where Main Street hasn’t moved to the suburbs, and the grocer, post office and bank are all within a few locks of each other. There the scene is set for the remainder of the tour. In those parts, locals have made it their livelihood to preserve the culture and architecture of the past.

In Fillmore County, it’s not just the descendants of the area’s gunslingers who are familiar with the belly of the local jails.

For some, crime does pay.

Tourists who have never been bold enough to inhabit the austere confines of the big house can volunteer for a night of pampered incarceration at Preston’s Jail House Inn, built circa 1869. Twelve rooms in the restored former county courthouse and jail serve all sorts of tastes including those who really want to feel what it was like inside a jail. The “cell block” room is the original and can sleep four. It’s even got the original toilet and bars.

Have a mocha cappuccino at the Brickhouse in Main, a pre-Civil War building that is the former home of a Chinese laundry, and visit the restored Railway Depot Museum.

One of the area’s dozens of antique shops, The Red Bench occupies the building of one of Preston’s four former banks. Built in 1889, the building now houses the shop’s owners upstairs and their collection downstairs. The vault is original.

Just outside of Preston, at the junction of Highways 16 and 52, Amish buggies often park on the gravel turnoff, and homemade food and crafts make for a good deal. There $5.50 gets a passing visitor a loaf of warm wheat bread, a half dozen oatmeal cookies and a jar of cherry jelly.

It’s called the “heart of bluff country,” but Lanesboro is really the entrance to southeastern Minnesota’s valleys of lush bluffs and limestone cliffs. Lanesboro is Minnesota’s Moab. And like the southern Utah biking Mecca, the town of 868 teems with outfitters, cafes, art galleries and specialty shops.

Despite the hefty dose of tourism, though, small-town U.S.A. lives on. On a recent visit, we spotted a makeshift sign in a doorway that read: “Went to bank. Be back in a jiff.” There aren’t too many places around that boast an entire business district that’s on the National Register of Historic Places. Plaques marking the designation are everywhere along Highway 16.

Look for knick-knacks at Ye Olde Back Room Gift Shoppe, or feast on New Zealand lamb chops and sautéed shrimp at the Old Village Hall Restaurant and Pub. Built in 1886, it still serves the people of Lanesboro, just in a different sort of way.

The Root River brushes Highway 16 near Whalan as it snakes through the valleys awash in cornfields and telephone poles.

In sleepy Whalan, Randy and Lynette Whalen (just a coincidence) bake more than 150 pies a week at the Whalen Inn, which has been serving what it boasts as the “world famous” homemade pies for 10 years. Cross the street and walk up the cobblestone sidewalk to Monique’s Antiques. Nearby, a wooden street sign directs locals down Main Street toward the town’s other avenues named Oak and New streets.

While it’s not the final stop on the highway (Houston and Hokah lie between it and La Crescent), Rushford is a fitting place to complete the tour. A variety of Victorian architectural models has been preserved along with the 1913 jailhouse, 1867 rail depot and the early 20th-century schoolhouse.

But it’s not just the historic preservation in this town of 2,000 that is the draw. The Friday night fish fry – that enduring midwestern tradition – is alive and well. In the span of one block, three restaurants – Stumpy’s, KC’s Norske Diner and the Mill Street Inn – all pack in locals and tourists alike with their weekly offerings of broiled and battered fish.

At the Mill Street Inn, antique tricycles and Victorian lamps hang from the rafters; the remainder of the spacious restaurant is occupied by a set of steer horns, moose head, Betty Boop thermometer, fully dressed turkey, neon lights, cash registers, a barber shop pole and various other miscellany of Americana spanning a century.

There, Erma and Don MacKenzie have converted the upper floor into a living area and decorated the former hardware store extensively since they purchased the building in 1999. The 130-year-old building served Rushford’s residents until 1985, when it was converted to a restaurant, beginning a long run as one of dozens of buildings in the area that has outlived its initial use.

Along Highway 16, that’s pretty common.