Small Towns, Wisconsin Southwest Region Summer 2014 | Page 37

Although it’s a small village, the area around Spring Green is home to several
major attractions. Entire books have been written about them, so we’ll only
mention them briefly.
Southwest Wisconsin is home to many buildings designed by Frank Lloyd
Wright, including his Taliesin Estate; the name (pronounced Tally-ESS-in) comes
from Welsh and means “shining brow.” Wright spent over 40 years working on
the house, changing it and the surrounding landscape continuously as he
tested his architectural ideas. By the time of his death in 1959, the house had
expanded to 37,000 square feet; the various buildings on the 600-acre estate
are a combined 75,000 square feet. Tours of the estate last one to four hours
and cost $20 to $85 per person. No interior photography is permitted.
Another architectural attraction, but a much stranger one, is the House on
the Rock. Fans of Neil Gaiman may have read about House on the Rock
in his novel American Gods. The author mentioned that he toned down his
description and left things out that actually appear in the house to make
the house more believable in his fantasy novel, where the house acted as a
portal to another dimension! The actual house is simply a large collection of...
well...pretty much everything. It contains the world’s largest indoor carousel
(with 269 animals, none of which are horses), a 200 foot model of a whale
fighting a squid, a three story bookcase full of rare books, instruments that
appear to play themselves, and much, much more. The original creator, Alex
Jordan, built the first 13 rooms by the early 1960s, but it has been added to
since. In 1985, for example, the Infinity Room (which extends 218 feet from the
house and has over 3,000 windows) was added. The house is divided into 3
sections; the cost is $12.50 per section or $28.50 for the complete experience.
Expect to spend at least a