Winnemac
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Winnemac is a fictional state in the United States invented by writer Sinclair Lewis. It contains the town of Zenith, the setting for Babbitt, Arrowsmith, and Dodsworth.
In Arrowsmith, Lewis describes Winnemac thus:
- The state of Winnemac is bounded by Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, and like them it is half Eastern, half Midwestern. There is a feeling of New England in its brick and sycamore villages, its stable industries, and a tradition which goes back to the Revolutionary War. Zenith, the largest city in the state, was founded in 1792. But Winnemac is Midwestern in its fields of corn and wheat, its red barns and silos, and, despite the immense antiquity of Zenith, many counties were not settled till 1860.
- The University of Winnemac is at Mohalis, fifteen miles from Zenith. There are twelve thousand students; beside this prodigy Oxford is a tiny theological school and Harvard a select college for young gentlemen. The University has a baseball field under glass; its buildings are measured by the mile; it hires hundreds of young Doctors of Philosophy to give rapid instruction in Sanskrit, navigation, accountancy, spectacle-fitting, sanitary engineering, Provencal poetry, tariff schedules, rutabaga-growing, motor-car designing, the history of Voronezh, the style of Matthew Arnold, the diagnosis of myohypertrophia kymoparalytica, and department- store advertising. Its president is the best money-raiser and the best after-dinner speaker in the United States; and Winnemac was the first school in the world to conduct its extension courses by radio.
The name is derived from Winamac (d. 1812), an important chief of the Potowatamie Indians. Winamac, whose name meant "catfish," was a signer of the 1795 Treaty of Grenville, in which Great Lakes tribes surrendered the site of Chicago to the U.S. government. Winamac and his people fought with the British in the War of 1812, and the warrior died during the fighting.
Real life "Winnemac"
There is a school district in northwestern Minnesota called Win-E-Mac. Its boundaries include the cities of Winger, Erskine, and McIntosh. This school district was created by consolidation of the Erskine and Macintosh-Winger school districts. Prior to the creation of this new district, the name Win-E-Mac had also been used by the golf course, and a now-closed motel.