Culture
Prairie du Chien has five National Historic Landmarks and nine sites on the National Register of Historic Places representing its significant history. The five Landmarks were the first designated in the state.
It is close to Wyalusing State Park in Wisconsin, and Effigy Mounds National Monument and Pikes Peak State Park in Iowa, sites of natural and manmade wonders. Its rich history and location by the Mississippi River, make the city a popular destination for tourists. The Prairie Villa Rendezvous, a gathering to recreate the atmosphere of a 19th-century fur trading camp, has been held annually in the city every Father's Day weekend since 1975, it attracts tens of thousands of visitors.
In 2001, Prairie du Chien gained brief national attention for its first annual New Year's Eve celebration, during which a carp from the Mississippi River was dropped from a crane over BlackHawk Avenue at midnight. The "Droppin' of the Carp" celebration has been held every New Year's Eve since.
Hunting and fishing have long been popular in the area. The opening of Cabela's fourth outlet store in the city in 1998 firmly established the city as a destination for sportsmen.
Read more about this topic: Prairie Du Chien Area School District
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)