Mineral Point

Walt Whitman was wrong: April is not the cruelest month. January is, or it certainly feels like it is. And February's not much better. To escape the winter doldrums, Jason and I spent a few days at the Brewery Creek Inn in Mineral Point the weekend of January 14-16. The inn is a lovely three-story limestone structure built in 1854 as a warehouse. While a warehouse doesn't sound very distinctive, it was a point of civic pride because it represented early statehood prosperity. Over the years, it was used as a cold storage facility, an insulation factory, and a local veterinarian's stable. By the 1970s, the building was in disrepair: The roof and third-floor timbers had rotted away, the beams had collapsed, and the north wall had begun to crumble. When the owners undertook renovations in July 1997, the building lacked heating, plumbing, wiring, interior walls or stairways, doors, and windows. And it had a dirt floor. Yet, they opened in June of the next year, which, to my non-construction-oriented mind, is a feat of great proportions.

The innkeeper forewarned us that our room (#7) was the smallest, but it was perfectly comfortable. The bathroom--with its ceramic tiles, wainscoting, and heavenly whirlpool--was probably my favorite part of the whole place. I was less keen on the breakfast, which was billed as "continental plus." I'm not sure where the "plus" part came in. To me, it was straight-up continental: boxed cereals, store-bought sourdough for toast with butter or jam, yogurt, juice, coffee, hard-boiled eggs, and syrupy-sweet store-bought pastries.

This is supposed to be me faking falling into the mine shaft, but it doesn't really look like that.

After slogging through Madison's Friday evening traffic (made worse by the snowy conditions), we finally made it out of the city. At the inn, we settled in and then ate dinner at the inn's restaurant. I had a gigantor slab of salmon with ginger sauce and sesame seeds. It was pretty good, and it definitely surpassed Jason's cod. For it, they drizzled the gingery sauce over the batterfried fish, leaving a hunk of bland cod in a soggy shell. We also sampled the beer, which is brewed on site. I liked the porter, but the IPA was disappointing for Jason. The description misled in that it said the hops and malt were balanced. Alas, the malt was overbearing, whereas the hops barely made an appearance. (Personally, I liked the IPA, but that's because I despise hoppy beer.) Afterward, we walked around the hilly town.

On Saturday, we hiked around the old Merry Christmas Mine Hill. In the 1830s, copper and tin miners from Cornwall, England fled poverty and hunger to emigrate to Mineral Point, which was experiencing a lead boom. The boom lasted from 1827 to 1849--when California's Gold Rush lured many of the miners away. In the second half of the 19th century, zinc mining predominated.

View of Mineral Point from the mining hill

After hiking, we took refuge from the cold in a local bar. For lunch, I had chicken fingers with barbecue sauce (exotic, I know) and Jason tried the local specialty, the pasty. The Cornish traditional version is a baked half-moon pastry filled with beef, potatoes, onions, and rutabagas or turnips. I tried a bite and found it rather bland and heavy, but I guess they were meant to fill up miners who'd been doing backbreaking labor all day.

According to legend, pasties were originally made for Cornish tin miners who were unable to come to the surface for lunch. To eat it, they would grip the crimped edge to not soil the rest with the dirt (laced with the arsenic often found with tin) that completely covered their bodies. The dirty remainder was then offered to placate the knockers, or spirits thought to inhabit the mine and endanger miners.

Close-up of pasty contents

After lunch, we grabbed coffee at a local bookstore and then headed back to the inn for a nap. That evening, we went to see Feed the Fish at the Mineral Point Opera House. Feed the Fish is a sweet indie film about a children's book writer who tries to overcome his writer's block by accompanying his friend on a trip to northern Wisconsin. Tony Shalhoub, of Monk and Big Night fame--and who's also a Green Bay native--plays the curmudgeonly local sheriff, and Barry Corbin (Maurice on Northern Exposure) plays his sage father. Katie Aselton and Ross Partridge play the romantic leads.

It was at last year's Wisconsin Film Festival in Madison and has been touring the state. I couldn't get tickets then because it was very popular, so I was excited to finally see it. (Note: Netflix won't purchase it until a certain number of people add it to their queues, so take a moment to add it.) Plus, it was a treat to see a film  set and filmed in Wisconsin, and one of the producers answered questions afterward.

The next day, we headed home and extended our relaxing weekend by having brunch at La Brioche and seeing the Coen Brothers' True Grit. I was pleasantly surprised, especially by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld's performance.