August Derleth
Rail Bridge
Sauk City, Wisconsin
By Kassie Jo Baron
Sauk City, Wisconsin, is best known as the home of the first Culver’s. Then probably the annual Cow Chip Throw, where residents spend Labor Day weekend seeing who can throw dried cow poop the farthest. Then, finally, for author August Derleth, who was born in Sauk City in 1909.
Growing up, I knew almost nothing about Derleth. We were told he was a kind of Mark Twain meets Henry David Thoreau of Wisconsin. We never read his work in public school, even though the locations were, quite literally, in our backyards; instead, we fell asleep on our assigned copies of A Sand County Almanac.
But what I do know of him was that as an 8-year-old, I would hold my bowl of orange slices in the back of my mom’s car as we crossed August Derleth Bridge over the Wisconsin River and passed Derleth’s state historical marker on my way to soccer games at August Derleth Park. On other days, we’d head to Leystra’s, a local restaurant, and pass the massive pie case to head into “Augie’s Room,” where we could enjoy our slices surrounded by Derleth memorabilia.
About a half mile downstream from the August Derleth Bridge stood a disused pony truss railroad bridge that was built in the 1901. One of Derleth’s portraits shows him walking across this bridge, a part of his regular route sauntering around the town he dubbed Walden West. “It was a good place to be alone,” he wrote, “I could meditate on any subject I chose…. How many poems came into being in that place! How much my view of Sac Prairie was expanded there!”
By my own childhood, the brown trusses were out of place and certainly out of time. In 2002, much to the delight of certain pyromaniacal children (I will not say if I was among them), the center portion of the bridge was demolished. In 2018, the remainder of the bridge was taken down, but I wasn’t there to see if it exploded. The spot is now the trailhead for the Great Sauk Trail, a bike path that runs through town. A chain-link fence erected in the same rusted brown of the bridge is now all that prevents visitors from stepping out onto the remaining span, which juts precipitously over the rush of the river twenty-some feet below. Wisconsin & Southern Railroad’s “No Trespassing” sign stands in front of extra trusses strewn haphazardly—if such a thing is possible—across the sun-bleached wood of the tracks.
It wasn’t until I started my Ph.D. program at the University of Iowa that I discovered Derleth might not just be a hometown boy after all. During a standard ice breaker, a professor shocked me by saying “isn’t that where August Derleth, the Lovecraft guy, is from?” I promptly went home and fell down an eldritch rabbit hole. It never occurred to me that Derleth did anything more than write a book about a mystery on Mosquito Island (which you can see if you look upstream from August Derleth Bridge).
Outside of Sauk City, Derleth is best known as H.P. Lovecraft’s publisher and the founder of Arkham House, a publishing company specializing in weird fiction that is still located in Sauk City, but is now all but defunct. A minor scandal arose when Derleth published stories as a “posthumous collaborator” with Lovecraft, viewed by others as an inappropriate imposition into the mythos. And Derleth’s scandals didn’t end there. In 1951, he was engaged to 16-year-old Sandra Evelyn Winters. In 1953, Derleth told a reporter from the Rhinelander Daily News, “We hope to be married Easter Monday—that’s April 6.… I’ll be 44 on Feb. 24 and Sandy will be 18 on March 1.” Residents certainly raised eyebrows, but they weren’t scandalized enough for me to hear this vital piece of hometown gossip until 2021, four years after I’d left the state.
Leystra’s restaurant closed in 2017 after 30 years, marking the end of Augie’s Room. Two years later, Sauk City completed construction of a splash pad and playground in what used to be August Derleth Park. The park was creatively renamed Riverfront Park and the formerly rustic sign at the entrance replaced with a significantly larger sign featuring cartoon turtles and racoons with, I am convinced, murderous impulses in their fiberglass hearts. During construction, the state historical marker was taken down.
These signs now decorate the walls of the August Derleth Society, currently in the building where I used to take tap dancing lessons. I visited the society for the first time earlier this year. “The only thing left is the bridge,” I joked with Jon Caflisch, the society’s treasurer, a man so passionate about Derleth he convinced me to join even though, until then, I had never read any Derleth (it’s only $25/year, and I get the newsletter now). Jon pointed to the green “August Derleth Bridge” sign, hanging just over a bookshelf filled with Derleth hardcovers. The bridge, it seems, doesn’t have a name anymore.
Derleth’s legacy was a fixture in the Sauk City of my childhood, even though no one I knew could tell you a single thing about him. Piece by piece that legacy evaporated, replaced with Culver’s relics and those Lovecraftian wildlife statues. I’m not saying there’s a conspiracy to erase Derleth from the region he wrote so fondly about, but I’m not not saying that either. If you’re passing near Sauk City, make some time to visit the August Derleth Society because, as Jon told me, “We might not be here much longer.”
Kassie Baron is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Iowa. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature with particular interest in the literary representations of white, female New England mill operatives’ bodies during the first US industrial revolution. She is a native of the Sauk Prairie area, a newly minted member of the August Derleth Society, and has never competed in the Cow Chip Throw.
