Progress vs. preservation on the real Main Street : Sauk Centre, model for the 1920 Sinclair Lewis novel, faces small-town’s struggle to survive.

This small prairie town has always felt ambivalent about being home to the quintessential Main Street. After all, Sauk Centre is the model for the town that native son Sinclair Lewis so unflatteringly wrote about in “Main Street.” To Carol Kennicott, the novel’s young bride, Gopher Prairie “was unprotected and unprotecting; there was no dignity in it nor any hope of greatness.”

In his 1920 novel, Lewis unleashed a blistering attack on small town ignorance, pettiness and small-mindedness. In Sauk Centre, there were some hurt feelings.

But Lewis and his fame are the biggest things that ever happened to Sauk Centre, and capitalizing on them may be the best hope for survival in an age of dying small towns.

Many in this hamlet of 3,500 residents fear that a proposed highway improvement project could ruin the old-fashioned look of what they call Original Main Street.

The plans for upgrading Highway 71 through town include widening Main Street from two lanes to three in some sections, adding turn lanes and eliminating some street parking. Construction crews also would reduce the width of grassy borders and take out shade trees in some residential blocks along historic Main Street.

“Terrible,” said Jim Fish, a City Council member, sitting at the lunch counter of the Palmer House, the shabby but historic Main Street hotel at the corner of Original Main Street and Sinclair Lewis Avenue.

Fish moved back to town and into his grandmother’s Main Street house nearly a decade ago. Two years ago, he learned of the highway project. “I was horrified and took up the fight to stop it.”

Opposition is not unanimous in town, but locals aren’t the only ones with concerns. The Minnesota Historical Society has recommended placing 10 blocks of Original Main Street on the National Register of Historic Places. The society has concluded that the road project has a “potential adverse effect” on the historic district.

Preservation groups also are watching. Under the proposal, “you’re losing a lot of what makes Sauk Centre look like it did 40 or 50 years ago,” said Kelly Sinclair, director of special projects for the National Trust for Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C.

Few would deny that the roadway needs work, and some observers are hopeful that a compromise can be reached. Nationally, many historic streets and bridges have been destroyed through modernization projects over the years.

But a 1991 transportation act allows some flexibility in applying usual federal design standards to road projects in historic districts. It remains to be seen whether it could be applied in Sauk Centre.

State officials maintain that they don’t want to push anything on the town it doesn’t want. But the stretch of Highway 71 through town is considered dangerous and in very poor condition for a busy thoroughfare, with a high accident rate.

The impending historic designation has helped fire enthusiasm that the town can really become more of a tourist draw and strengthen its ties to Lewis.

Even though Lewis never quite admitted his novel was based on his hometown, everybody recognized the setting as Sauk Centre. Local businesses began adopting the novel’s place names, and the high school named its sports teams the “Main Streeters.”

“People come to Main Street because they have read or heard of Lewis,” said Al Tingley, co-owner of the Palmer House. “They see Main Street in their mind’s eye.”

Tingley feels vindicated, because he and his business partner’s 18-year struggle to fix up the hotel and celebrate the town’s famous author is finally being embraced by his neighbors. “We’re right on the verge of becoming a historic district,” said Tingley, an avowed Lewis buff who can cite chapter and verse from many of his novels. “This is my dream. Nobody would listen to me 18 years ago. I was a nut.”

Tingley serves up coffee and soup in the hotel’s dining room in front of a blackboard advertising the daily special, roast pork dinner at $3.75, and ham and bean soup.

Sauk Centre is not exactly on life’s fast lane, but it is on a highway traveled to and from popular lake districts. And some motorists notice signs hawking Sauk Centre as the birthplace of Lewis and pull off the interstate halfway between Minneapolis/St. Paul and Fargo, N.D. Besides Original Main Street, they find a small Lewis museum to peruse.

That’s how a young family from Amsterdam came to be dining in the Palmer House one quiet January day. “I love the book,” said Kester Freriks, who was traveling with his wife and daughter. “It’s a very good introduction to small town life in Minnesota.”