The Teenie Weenies were two inches tall. William Donahey drew them for the newspapers for decades, a civilization of tiny people improvising a life out of full-sized objects, and their home was a pickle barrel under a rose bush. Millions of readers knew that barrel. Which is how, in 1926, a pickle company came to build one sixteen feet tall on the shore of a U.P. lake.
The company was Reid, Murdoch and Company of Chicago, whose Monarch brand sold pickles in miniature oak casks, and whose advertising the Teenie Weenies had graced. They commissioned Harold S. Cunliff of the Pioneer Cooperage Company, a firm whose ordinary business was actual barrels, to build the cartoonist a habitable one as a summer cottage. It went up on Grand Sable Lake near Grand Marais, just inland from the dunes where the log slide drops to Lake Superior, and it was not a cabin with a barrel theme. It was a barrel. A sixteen-foot main cask held a living room on the ground floor and a bedroom up a stair, a second, smaller barrel held the kitchen, and a pantry connected the two. For a man who had spent his career drawing tiny people living inside oversized groceries, it was the joke made real, and he got to live in it.
Everyone understood what it also was. A giant Monarch pickle barrel sitting beside a scenic lake was an advertisement that never stopped running, and it did its job far too well.
The Donaheys summered in the barrel for ten years, and the barrel spent those ten years becoming famous. The curious came by car and by boat to see the cartoonist’s house, and a hideaway that drew a crowd stopped being a hideaway. By 1936 the couple had had enough. The barrel was hauled into downtown Grand Marais, the Donaheys let it go, and the town began finding uses for it: over the decades it served as an ice cream stand, an information kiosk, and a souvenir shop, sitting on its corner like the world’s most committed piece of packaging.
Then it nearly rotted away. By 2003 the barrel stood abandoned and in disrepair, which for a wooden building in a Lake Superior town is the beginning of the end. The Grand Marais Historical Society took it over that year, put roughly $125,000 into bringing it back, and reopened it on July 3, 2005 as a museum of Donahey, the Teenie Weenies, and the barrel’s own strange life. The National Register of Historic Places had already listed it in February 2004, which means the United States government maintains an official record affirming that a two-story pickle barrel is historically significant. It is hard to argue. Name another one.
The U.P. has bigger attractions and taller ones. But the Pickle Barrel House might be the purest example of the region’s particular gift: somebody’s completely sincere, slightly absurd idea, built well enough to outlast everyone who laughed at it. The tiny people got a real house. The town got a landmark. The pickle company got ninety-nine years of advertising and counting.
More worth reading
Sources, credits, and reporting details
Sources & accountability
How this story was reported
Editorial methodAggregation
Last verifiedAug. 14, 2026
Corrections statusNo material correction note is recorded on this article.
Verification note: The move year is 1936 per Wikipedia and consistent with ten summers from 1926; one roadside source says 1937. An unsourced eight-mile move distance was caught and removed before filing. The strip is described without naming its syndicate, which was not confirmed in a consulted source.
Primary sources
-
Pickle Barrel House — Wikipedia (citing the NRHP nomination)
Accessed Aug. 14, 2026.
-
Pickle Barrel House / The Teenie Weenies historical marker — Michigan historical marker / HMdb
Accessed Aug. 14, 2026.
Additional reporting
-
Pickle Barrel House Museum — Burt Township / Grand Marais Historical Society
Accessed Aug. 14, 2026.
Supports: The Historical Society operates the house as a museum today.
Photo and media credits
-
Pickle Barrel House (Michigan) June 2021 — Notorious4life / Wikimedia Commons
Featured image record. Accessed Aug. 14, 2026. CC0.
Supports: Photo credit for the featured image.
-
Pickle Barrel House interior — otisourcat / Flickr via Wikimedia Commons
Accessed Aug. 14, 2026. CC BY-SA 2.0.
_June_2021.jpg){kind=link}
Yooper Hub community
The conversation
Real neighbors, real names. A Yooper Hub editor reads your first comment before it appears; after that you’re a known neighbor and your comments post right away. No account required. Community guidelines
No comments yet. Yours can start the conversation.