Barrel Home for Teenie Weenies at Grand Marais By

8/14/2019 Barrel Home for Teenie Weenies at Grand Marais By

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A heavily wooded shore linehard wood, with tall spruce pushing likeslim spires of darkest green.

How do you get to that new summerhome that is being built near here? weasked a resident of Grand Marais.

Drive past the park and follow the righthand road out three miles until you come

to Lake Sable, turn to your right andfollow the lake shore a little ways. Youcant miss the house.

We drove through three miles of lovelyorchard and then came smack up

against the lake. The road went right intothe water.

Is this the way to the bungalow? weinquired of a workman building a shacknear by.

On the Way

Drive right in the lake and around thecorner of that sand dune, but keep ongoing. If you stop youll get stuck in the

lake sand.We kept on going and drove a shortdistance with the lake on one side of usand the wall of sand dunes on the other.We felt just like the Israelites going

through the Red Sea.The road soon wound onto dry land and

Barrel Home for Teenie Weenies at Grand MaraisBy Manthei Howe

Reprinted from Daily Mining Journal, Marquette, Michigan


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debouched into a clearing. And therestood the queerest little home in all theworld, we do believe. One had to take asly pinch to see if that house was just adream of a page from a fairy book.

It was real, though, real as the lakeand the sky and the lovely birch, mapleand evergreen trees standing all aroundit.

The little summer home is a barrel, 12feet in diameter, top and bottom, 16 feethigh, and 16 feet wide at the bulge. (Wecalled it bulge but the man told us bulgewas all right for a big waist line, butwhen one spoke of barrels, one saidbilge.)

Another One

Just back of it, connected with a small

entry, is a smaller barrel. It is 8 feet indiameter and 8 feet high. Both barrel-houses are set on concrete foundations.

Oh-ing and ah-ing we walked all aroundthe little house, touching it to make sure

it was real.

The front barrel has the duckiest little

front door with a tiny porch roof upheldwith short birch uprights. At either sideis a porch lantern made of a TeenieWeenie pickle barrel. Just above the doorare letters cut from birch bark, spellingMonarch Teenie Weenies. On the verytip-top of the house is a colored pictureof two Teenie Weenies. Around at theside is the same lettering as that carried

by the real Teenie Weenie pickle keg andon the wall of the entry is a big coloredpicture of the Clown, the Dunce and theBaby of the Teenie Weenie stories.

Strange Room

We entered that odd little front door andfound ourselves in a living room, thequeerest imaginable, for it had curvingsides, and when the door swung openagainst the wall the edges were not

straight, as house doors usually are, butwere curved as the story book doors(come true) should be.

Tiny windows, four of them, opened andswung inward so Teenie Weenies could

look outdoors on a fine morning. Tancurtains with blue and brown polka dots


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A wonderful and beautiful country in the North peninsula of Michigan.

covered the screened windows and a biground table, with legs built of birch logs,sat in the middle of the room. Brown andtan rugs on the floors and comfortablechairs with woodsy brown covers,completed the furnishing of the room.

A curving stairway up the side of the

barrel living room

led upstairs to thebedroom where therewere three TeenieWeenie brown beds,a birch-wood bedsidetable and wide open

windows from whichthe Teenie Weeniescould talk to thebirds or look at thelake.

Everything Ready

And then downstairs we wandered andout into the entry on one side of whichwas the kitchen door and on the other

were shelves stacked with pretty disheswith a gay flower pattern. On the topshelf was a black teapot already to steep

a hospitable cup of tea.

Through the entry one went to the barrelkitchen, fitted with a 3-burner oil stove

and a drop leaf table, and stacked withthe skillets, pans and kettles needed forhousekeeping. On a shelf stood threeTeenie Weenie pickle barrels in a row, to

be used as

containers for sugar,flour, spice and otherthings nice.

All the lightingfixtures in the house

were composed ofsmall pickle barrelswith the sidesremoved and fittedwith squatty yellowcandles. They made

the finest lanterns imaginable.

Mr. Donahey, creator of the TeenieWeenie characters, whose adventures thechildren have followed in the Teenie

Weenie books and in newspapers, hadbeen invited to bring his wife to GrandMarais ostensibly for a fishing trip, but


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The Teenie Weenie home is most interesting, for it shows the achievement of a real problem in building.


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A fishing rod with a stiff joint.

We bet she was!

S. P. Stevens, vice-president of Reid,Murdoch & Co., and Mrs. Stevensaccompanied the Donaheys to GrandMarais for the presentation.

The Teenie Weenie home is most

interesting, for it shows the achievementof a real problem in building. When Mr.Stevens first broached the subject,

really for a very different purpose.

She Was Surprised

When Mr. and Mrs. Donahey arrived they

were taken to Lake Sable where one ofthe Grand Marais children, dressed asthe little General, came down the pebblypath from the Teenie Weenie house andpresented to Mrs. Donahey a big golden

key to the summer home which had beenprepared for her as a surprise gift byReid, Murdoch & Co., in appreciation ofthe Teenie Weenie drawings which Mr.Donahey had made for the Companysadvertisements. Back of the General,from behind the shadowy shelter of thetrees, stepped other children of GrandMarais costumed as the Policeman,Sailor, Soldier, Dunce, Cook, Scotchman,and the Lady of Fashion. All the beloved

Teenie Weenie characters came troopingdown to welcome the Teenie Weenie ladyto her new home.

As one breathless youngster said:

We bet Mrs. Donahey is the surprisedestlady in the world.


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Behind us to the North, lie sand dunesgreat, tall, cliff-like dunes andsoftly rolling ones.

Ill welcome anyone to its quaint little door yard.

Most delightful of all, though, is the joy that will come to the youngsters who mayhave an opportunity to visit Lake Sable and see the home of their beloved TeenieWeenies. They will get a thrill out of knowing that the Teenie Weenie man and hiswife live in such a duck of a Teenie Weenie house.

experts said it would be impossible to construct a keg of that size to be used forhousing purposes, but the Pioneer Cooperage Company of Chicago succeeded inaccomplishing the feat.

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Barrel Home for Teenie Weenies at Grand Marais By