When I was a teenager in Madison in the early 1960s, it seemed that almost every small town in Wisconsin was graced by a brewery.
My friends and I would use that perception as a reason to cruise the rolling hills south and west of the capital city (home, naturally, of Capital City beer), enjoying the passing scenery and picking up six-packs of previously unsampled brews to take home for careful evaluation.
Fountain City — with both a brewery and an especially picturesque setting between the Mississippi River and the limestone bluffs which tower hundreds of feet above the river valley — became a favorite destination.
A home for the elderly now sits where Fountain Brew once was made, but there’s a new reason to visit here. Fountain City has acquired a major attraction, a place where one can contemplate the puniness of man in the face of nature and the way fate can suddenly come calling — sometimes fatally.
The attraction (tour buses are welcome, by the way) is the House with a Rock in It.
No, no, not the House on the Rock.
That sprawling architectural phenomenon is more than 110 miles south and east of here. Featuring endless and dizzying collections of Americana (a room filled with carousels, for instance), the House on the Rock has become the state’s most-visited site. Some 500,000 tourists a year tromp through it at up to $19.95 a pop.
Where the House on the Rock has vast parking lots, however, John and Frances Burt, who own the House with a Rock in It, have parking for maybe half a dozen cars. Here, there’s just one thing to see — though it is a big thing. And though the Burts are in attendance sometimes when the house is open to the public, often there’s just a cigar box out front for you to put a buck in if you want to see a smallish house with a REALLY BIG ROCK in the bedroom.
Though some tourist attractions, the Grand Canyon, for example, take eons to create, and others, the House on the Rock, for one, were built up over decades, the House with a Rock in It happened in seconds.
April 24, 1995 was a Monday. Maxine and Dwight Anderson, taking advantage of the fact that both of them were retired, slept in. After breakfast, Dwight and Brandy, a springer spaniel, headed off to the workshop Dwight had built a few blocks away.
Maxine decided to photograph the remodeling job her husband and a friend recently had completed on the house the Andersons had lived in for the past 10 years. She started with a shot through the living room windows out to the view of the Mississippi. After working her way though the rest of house, she went back to the dining room and took a picture toward the kitchen. In the photo, you can see the bedroom door and the clock on the wall next to it showing the time as 11:37.
Her next stop was the kitchen. As she opened the door, she heard what she first thought was thunder. She glanced toward the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ boat yard across the highway but saw nothing unusual, so she snapped a shot of the cabinets surrounding the stove. In that photo, the clock shows 11:38.
A crash course
At that moment, there was a tremendous crash in the next room. The building shuddered, knocked — it later would be determined — a quarter inch off its foundation.
“I thought a dead tree had crashed through the master bedroom,” she recalled in a text she later prepared for a Fountain City Historical Society brochure. She decided to go outside to see what had happened.
“I tried the door that leads from the living room to the sun porch. . I found [it] had jammed when whatever-it-was struck the house. As I was trying to open the door, I heard a knock at the kitchen door.”
It was Jim Marquardt, a family friend and employee of the Corps of Engineers. “I asked him,” Maxine said, “if a tree had fallen on the house.”
What had fallen was a 55-ton, 16-foot tall slab of layered limestone, whose most recent address was 500 feet up the bluff. It now filled their bedroom.
As it tore down the hillside the boulder had cut a trench four feet deep in places. Before it hit the house, a big chunk had split off, leaving the giant rock with a surprisingly smooth face on one side.
Amazingly, though the rock had struck the house just under the attic window and just to the left of a chimney, neither the window nor the chimney were damaged. In fact, not a window in the house was broken. Mirrors on the bedroom wall were intact. The TV set was knocked to the floor but still worked. The kitchen clock stopped at the moment of impact, and on the counter beneath it, Anderson’s camera lay with its flash still turned on.
Maxine shot the rest of the roll to document “our house which at 11:38 a.m. was redecorated by the boulder. The rest,” she said, “is history.”
The town where the House with a Rock in It is situated was founded in 1839 as Holmes Landing by Thomas Holmes, who came to trade with Native Americans and to service steamboats. It was renamed Fountain City for the tiny streams of water that spurt from the base of the bluffs.
Though it’s not exactly a historical milestone on the level of the Battle of Hastings, the day-the-rock-fell-into-the-house looms large in the past of this town of less than 1,000. The Burts are determined to keep that slice of history alive.
On the fateful morning, Frances Burt was returning from lunch to the bank where she was working at the time.
“I noticed the fresh break in the rock bluff,” she said, “and I told my boss, `A rock fell in the woods behind the Anderson’s house.’
`No,’ he said, `it hit the house.’
Soon thereafter, Frances and her husband had the idea that they should make the house into a museum. “I didn’t want to have the rock hauled out and see the place turned into just another house,” she says.
“Something important to Fountain City happened here.”
There is a tradition in these parts of small quirky museums. Elmer Duellman, who works at the Conoco gas station in town, has Elmer’s Car and Toy Museum, five buildings full of vehicles and toys that he and his wife, Bernadette have collected over 30 years. Retired farmer Herman Rusch bought the Prairie Moon Dance Pavilion six miles upriver and made it a museum of his collection of curios and unusual machines (a washing machine powered by a goat on a treadmill).
Changing ownership
The Andersons were more than willing to sell their place. Right after the rock fell, they packed some belongings and left, never to spend another night in the house at 440 N. Shore Drive. (Maxine, now widowed, lives across the river in Winona, — birthplace of Winona Ryder — Minn.)
The Burts, who live nearby, bought the house — rock, furniture, TV set and all — for $35,000. They opened it as a musuem on Memorial Day that same year.
In the seven years since, some50,000 people have been through the museum, a tenth of what the House on the Rock attracts in a single season.
On a good July or August weekend (depending on the weather, the house is open March or April into mid-October or early November), 100 people a day might come through. The weekday before the Tribune visited, the Burts made $10.
They’re not in it for the money.
“Some people have cottages or cabins,” Frances said. “This is ours.”
They delight in going over the guest register, which lists visitors from as far away as Austria, Denmark, Peru and Moldova. A lot of the business is repeat, former visitors bringing friends and relatives with a promise of “You gotta see this.”
The tour starts with a little background.Then there’s the moment.
The door to the bedroom could not be more ordinary, adding to the extraordinariness of what’s behind it. As it swings open, there is no visible bedroom, just the face of the huge limestone rock, smooth from splitting on its way down the hill. A narrow path leads out to the courtyard behind the house.
“Everybody says the same thing when they first see it,” John says. “`Oh my god!’ I told a local clergyman that this must be a holy rock by now.”
“Sometimes,” Frances said, “they just start laughing, and then they’ll stop and say, `I shouldn’t be laughing; it’s not funny.’ Others walk right by and ask, `Where is it?’ They think it’s a wall.”
Rock souvenirs
After viewing the rock, there’s a chance to buy some photos or a T-shirt or sweatshirt. Or maybe salt and pepper shakers made from Rolling Rock beer bottles. In the yard, some decorative rocks are on sale.
There is also the chance to ponder mortality.
Early on April 5, 1901, a woman named Dubler, who was living on the property now occupied by the House with a Rock in It (about where the garage is now), was not as lucky as Mrs. Anderson.
She and her husband, who was blind, were asleep when a five-ton rock split off from the bluff above, careened downhill and crashed through their roof.
A newspaper, the Winona Republican Herald, carried this account:
“The old couple had retired and were sleeping peacefully when the crash came. Whatever noise had been occasioned by the stone tumbling through the woods above the house was of such short duration that they did not hear it and Mr. Dubler was awakened to find himself dropped through the cellar amid the ruins of his home. The rumble, followed by piteous cries for help, alerted the neighbor who soon aroused the whole town.
“The house was so badly wrecked that it was impossible for a time to reach the inmates who were buried beneath. At last Mr. Dubler was lifted out of the basement and a hasty examination revealed that he was practically uninjured except for a slight bruise on his forehead.
“The fate of his wife, however, was quite different. She had been struck squarely by the rock. Her body was crushed and mangled almost beyond recognition.”
Just a few weeks ago, an even larger slab than the one that visited the Anderson house fell about a mile north. That 200-ton, 30-by-12-foot rock landed in a wooded area.
There seem to be fissures developing in the bluff above the House with a Rock in It.
“Something will come down someday,” John said jovially.
“I won’t sleep here,” Frances said.
She wasn’t kidding.
