Sinclair Lewis worked the night desk here, and then wrote the book that made this town famous.
The Palmer House stands on the northwest corner of Sauk Centre's principal intersection, at 500 Sinclair Lewis Avenue, on what the hotel calls the Original Main Street. Ralph and Christena Palmer built it in 1901 and expanded it in 1916, and it has been a hotel, restaurant and pub ever since.
The building is worth looking at properly. It is three storeys of brick, with round-arched windows and doors running along the ground floor of both street-facing elevations, picked out in decorative brickwork. The arched windows opening into the lobby and restaurant hold stained glass imported from Vienna. Upstairs the windows are rectangular, with light corbeling marking a belt course just below the second-floor sills and again along the cornice, and brick pilasters dividing the bays. The rear addition, put up fifteen years after the original, replicates the first section exactly. There were once low parapets at the roofline corners, since removed.
It went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, for local significance in commerce and social history, nominated as an example of a once-common hotel type built specifically for travelling salesmen. In 1994 it was also listed as a contributing property to the Original Main Street Historic District.
The photographs scattered through the hotel, the restaurant and the lobby tell two stories at once: the town's, and Sinclair Lewis's, including his stint here as night clerk. The Palmer House sat at the centre of the boyhood ground that became the raw material for his work.
It is still open, still a member of the Minnesota Hotel and Lodging Association and the National Restaurant Association, and it runs historical tours. The lobby is large enough to spend an afternoon in, which is more or less the invitation.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
