The Dells through a child's eyes

Chapter 4 - The Dells

Our first trip in the new camper was a weekend getaway to Wisconsin Dells. Now, it is known as the Water Park Capital of the World, but in 1966, it was a calm, restful place for parents to let their young children discover all that is kitschy, while Mom and Dad try to absorb the natural surroundings of rock and water.

          Henry Hamilton Bennett is credited with putting the area on the map. In the late 1800s, when the Dells was called Kilbourn City, Bennett began taking photographs of the natural wonders along the Wisconsin River. He experimented with new and innovative photography and changed many aspects of how pictures were captured. As word spread of the amazing photographs he sold, tourists began journeying to Kilbourn City to see these places for themselves.

          H. H. Bennett Studio is still on Main Street, and as part of the National Register of Historic Places, it serves as a historical museum.

          In the 1920s, enough Americans owned automobiles that they could truly flock to The Dells. In the first half of the twentieth century, the beauty of the Dells themselves, the rock formations carved by thousands of years of the rush of the Wisconsin River and the work of glaciers were what people came to see. The famous ducks, amphibious vehicles engineered and first used by the military, would ferry tourists across land and directly into the water for scenic views of the area beginning in the late 1940s.

          By the 1950s various entrepreneurs saw opportunities to expand the tourist attractions. One of the first such attractions was Storybook Gardens and Mother Goose Land. These beautifully landscaped grounds had life-size figures from all the beloved fairy tales of my youth. There was a little cottage with statues of the three bears, waiting to greet any girl willing to be their Goldilocks. There was the wall Humpty Dumpty sat on precariously. There were three men in a tub in the middle of a pond. Many more settings from children's stories dotted the grounds.

          When my family visited the Dells in 1966, Pat and I ran from one fairytale scene to the next. We pretended to eat porridge with the bear family and carried on imaginary conversations with some statute children outside a giant shoe. We climbed the crooked ladder to the roof of the crooked home of the crooked man and his crooked wife and slid down the crooked slide.

Storybook Gardens closed in 2010, and the local fire department burned down the big boat at the entrance the following year as part of their training exercises. It's a shame that today's children don't have the chance to live out fairytales like my generation did. It's a shame that their idea of fun is going down the waterslide over and over again without using any imagination. Do they even know about Mother Goose?

          For me, though, since I can't swim, it would always be enough to frolic in the grass and pretend that I was Little Red Riding Hood.

Anyone who has seen any pictures of Wisconsin Dells, has seen these iconic formations. When H.H. Bennett started photographing the area, he took pictures of his son jumping across this space. Now they have a German Shepherd do it. And there is a net underneath him. I took this pictures in October of 2021 when Hubby and I spent a weekend in the Dells.