Minnesota, "The Nation's Vacationland", Naniboujou Superior Lodge, Lake Superior 1948

This 1948 map advertised the state of Minnesota's reputation as ‘the nation’s vacation land’ and was created for the Arthur L. Roberts Hotel company.

Roberts owned hotels in Winona, Rochester, St. Paul, Minneapolis, St. Cloud, Stillwater, Hastings, Brainerd and Fergus Falls. The company also operated hotels in New Jersey, New Hampshire, Florida and North Carolina.

This menu cover was created for guests staying at the Naniboujou Superior Lodge on the north shore of Lake Superior, the jewel in the hotel chain’s crown.

Once an ultra-exclusive private club for the wealthy that went bust during the Depression, it was bought out of bankruptcy by Roberts in 1939, and he operated the facility as a hotel.

Guests ate in the lavishly decorated dining room, with Cree Indian designs painted on the walls. The dining room also had the largest stone fireplace in the state of Minnesota, standing 20ft high and made with 200 tons of native rock.

Activities offered included archery, croquet, badminton, lawn tennis, trap and skeet shooting, swimming and canoeing.

After Roberts died in 1953, Naniboujou was bought by a series of new owners and is still open part of the year.

We believe this map was created by the accomplished artist Martin Fowler (1912-1998).

Martin Fowler was born in Schenectady, NY. In 1931, he won a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in New York City and graduated in 1934 with a degree in commercial art. He worked in Cleveland initially and then came to Minneapolis to work for the Minneapolis Tribune.

He worked for advertising giant Brown and Bigelow – this menu image could be from that period in his career - and then formed Fowler, Allard, and Brown (FAB Artists, Inc.).

Fowler went on to specialize in oil and watercolor paintings and he and his wife Alice and their three children lived in a distinctive log cabin home on land located on Excelsior Blvd.

NB: Minnesota is famously known as the ‘Land of 10,000 Lakes.’ However, this is an understatement. In 2019 a state inventory counted 11, 842 lakes of ten acres or greater. This jumps to 21,871 if you count wetlands and small basins of at least 2.5 acres.

For more information about artist Martin Fowler see : https://slphistory.org/fowlermartin/