Mineral Point

Mineral Point predates Wisconsin statehood by nearly two decades, built in the 1820s around lead deposits that drew a wave of Cornish miners from southwest England, and their influence is still stamped directly into the landscape — squat, thick-walled limestone cottages, built low into the hillsides in the exact style of Cornwall’s own mining villages. Lia and I walked Shake Rag Street, named, according to local lore, for wives waving dish rags from cottage doors to call miners home for supper, and it remains the best-preserved stretch of this vernacular architecture anywhere in the state.

Pendarvis and the Cornish miners

We toured Pendarvis, a state historic site preserving several of these original Cornish miner cottages, restored in the 1930s by two local men who essentially rescued the neighborhood from demolition and, in doing so, sparked Mineral Point’s slow transformation into an arts colony. Our guide walked us through a cottage kitchen explaining how families here made pasties — hand pies originally packed for miners to carry underground — a food tradition that’s stuck around town so thoroughly that we ate one for lunch an hour later at a bakery on High Street.

High Street’s studios

By the 1930s the lead had run out and the town had emptied considerably, but that same stock of cheap, sturdy stone buildings drew artists looking for studio space, and High Street today is lined with working potteries, blacksmith shops, and galleries that still feel like functioning workshops rather than gift shops. We spent our last hour there watching a potter throw a bowl on a wheel in full view of the street, glazed mugs from her last kiln firing cooling on a shelf by the window — one of which came home with us.

Getting There

Dane County Regional Airport (MSN) in Madison is the closest with commercial service, about an hour east. A car is essential; Mineral Point sits in the rolling Driftless Area, unglaciated hill country with no public transit connecting the small towns.