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The cabins were owned by Blanche Hunter, an eccentric and independent Winona character all but erased from the city’s history. Few people remember Hunter. The details can only sketch her character: She dressed in black, and wore knee boots; she walked with a limp; she kept sheep in her yard and never married.
“She was a very independent woman,” said Harold Streater, 89, who knew her through his role as city attorney in the 1950s. “I admired her because she was independent.”
Hunter was born in 1902 to Walter and Minnie Hunter of Pepin, Wis. Her father was a riverboat captain who in 1916 piloted the last lumber raft down the Mississippi River. The family moved to Winona in 1918, and Blanche was an honor student at Winona Senior High School, where she worked as stenographer on the yearbook, the Radiograph, and graduated in 1920.
After high school, she worked as a stenographer at Merchants Bank and the Hayes-Lucas Lumber Co. In 1924, she and her father opened a Gopher State Oil station at Johnson and Fourth streets in downtown Winona. Two years later, Walter Hunter, widowed in 1922, moved down river to Bellevue, Iowa, where he remarried and lived for nearly 40 years.
Blanche lived briefly in the Twin Cities, but by 1934 she had returned to Winona and was operating tourist cabins on Mankato Avenue.
Hunter didn’t lack money or business acumen. She served as a sort of bank for people who couldn’t otherwise get credit, and held contract deeds on numerous houses around the city.
Nor did she lack heart.
“She took in any number of girls that were in trouble — out of money — and took care of them,” Streater said.
Those who remember the TeePee Cabins say it had sketchy reputation as a “hot pillow” motel — a place popular for trysts.
Winona resident Mary Pendleton remembers going to a dance at the main lodge sometime around her 1935 high school graduation. “I remember being surprised that my mother let me go,” she said. “It didn’t have a very good reputation.”
Despite the cabins’ reputation, Hunter bristled at snubs from city leaders — such as in the flood of 1952, when the city built a temporary dike along Mankato, letting the cabins flood.
“Well! How did you find us and dare write our name now?” she began a 1947 letter to the Winona Tourist Committee, apparently in response to a request for dues. “When publishing the Winona literature it seemed to hurt to have so as much as mention us. We have survived floods, fire, war, criticism and insults.”
Hunter sold the TeePee site in 1964 to the Linahan family, who built one of the “bed in a box” motels that Hunter so disdained. (It is now a Quality Inn.)
When she was in her 50s, Hunter took several psychology and management classes at Winona State. Pendleton said her husband — himself an adult scholar — took classes with her.
On Sept. 12, 1966, Blanche Hunter was found dead in her home. The Winona Daily News ran a brief death notice. She had no siblings, spouse or children. Her father had died four years earlier.
Hunter left her estate of more than $81,000 — about $476,000 today adjusted for inflation — to the Lutheran Memorial Hospital in Bellevue. By the time her estate was settled, the hospital was no more, and her assets were split between Winona General (Community Memorial) Hospital and the Gillette Children’s Hospital in St. Paul.
Ervin wrote on Aug 8, 2006 4:33 PM: