NORTHFIELD, Minn.-
If you like laid-back and artsy, with an intellectual edge – and if your breakfast of choice is hot cereal – then by all means try to talk your kid into applying to school in this charming college town.
A scant hour down Interstate 35 from Minneapolis in southeast Minnesota, Northfield has done a grand job of preserving its history, boasting a handsome collection of restored late 19th-century buildings in its smallish business district.
In truth, there’s not a lot going on here except for farming and higher education. Of its two colleges, Carleton and St. Olaf, Carleton — recently ranked sixth in U.S. News & World Report’s list of top liberal arts colleges — is perhaps the better known. It’s where Paul Wellstone taught for many years before he was elected to the U.S. Senate.
But St. Olaf’s, founded in the late 1800s to educate Norwegian immigrants, also contributes to the quirky cultural brew, with talks like one last April by Princess Martha Louise of Norway, who was visiting to discuss her children’s book “Why Kings and Queens Don’t Wear Crowns.”
As in any college town, visitors can while away the hours in excellent used bookstores, artsy gift shops and cafes where coffee beans and loose teas are taken very seriously. It was at the local co-op, Northfield Community Hercantile, where I bought organic cotton “mantra” socks with the words “Just breathe” and “I am calm” inscribed on the ankle.
Looming over town — and spewing out a comfortingly sweet aroma similar to that of freshly-based cookies — are the plants that make the gloriously retro Malt-O-Meal cream of wheat cereal as well as the company’s ready-to-eat brands.
If, like my husband and me, you can’t start the day without hot cereal, then stay at the Victorian-era Archer House, which serves honest-to-goodness oatmeal for breakfast — the kind that’s nutty-flavored, chewy and powerful enough to sustain you through epic winters.
Which reminds me: This MIGHT not be the place for you — or your child — if one or both of you hates winter. We visited in early spring, when daffodils were blooming in New York, but all was still drizzle and gloom in Northfield.
Still, if you live in a place as hectic and crazed as Manhattan, Northfield is tonic for the soul. It bills itself as the town of “cows, colleges and contentment,” and, on a long weekend sojourn, it seemed to be just that.
Not to mention a place where restaurants serve Swedish meatballs, Minnesota-grown wild rice and walleye, a lake fish that’s something of a statewide obsession.
In short, if your kid goes to college here, you’ll get to imagine, every time you visit, that you’re part of a world like Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion,” where the women are strong, the men are good-looking and, well, you know the rest.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
