"How Lou Ringling & Dawn Manor Made Lake Delton" Presentation by Sauk County Historical Society Executive Director Paul Wolter at the Frank Fischer Center. When Lou Ringling was a child, her father purchased and operated a hotel in McGregor, Iowa. Growing up, Lou helped her father run the hotel and continued to do so after she married her first husband, Jefferson Redding.
Decades later after her second husband, Al. Ringling, died, Lou would return to her childhood by building the Morris Hotel on Mirror Lake, the first modern hotel in the Delton area. Inspired by Lou Ringling's Hotel, another development in the area was planned by the Dells Area Development Association to build a new lake and resort centered around the Dawn Manor estate, the last piece of the lost city of Newport. What began over 100 years ago led to the development of modern-day Lake Delton, now one of the most visited places in Wisconsin.
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