Town Finds New Life By Reinventing Itself - For A Price

McGILLICUDDY CITY, N.D. - Just ask, and folks around here will spin the tale happily: Dr. Aloysius Percival McGillicuddy, writing his will on June 28, 1891, revealed the secret recipe for his beloved vanilla and mint schnapps - the elixirs he purveyed down at the Shady Eye Saloon.

He made quite an impression. A century later, the town's only grocery store grills up a McGillicuddy Burger for $2.50. The good doctor's "country fresh" schnapps and iced root beer are served up and down Main Street. Signs at the edge of town mark the man's immortality.

That is the tale. Now consider these facts:

-- Dr. McGillicuddy never existed. There are no McGillicuddy bones buried in the hillside cemetery east of town, no McGillicuddys in the local history printed during the Bicentennial. Nor are there any in the vicinity; the nearest one (Daniel) lives in Grand Forks, 180 miles east.

-- The liqueur the doctor "bequeathed" to the town is concocted somewhere in Canada, then imported to Kentucky by a Louisiana company for bottling before making its way back north.

-- For more than a century, until this past spring, this place was Granville, a onetime cattle-ranching frontier town with a raucous history all its own and 270 people struggling for its continued existence.

Its new incarnation was invented by a spirits importer who thought renaming a town would be a heck of an advertising gimmick. It was embraced by a community struggling with a bare-bones economy and a thinning population - a community that campaigned for its new name and got a promise of 100,000 corporate dollars in return.

So it happened that in April, city fathers turned out, state lawmakers came, the importer sent a representative and they all had a parade. Granville, settled by ascetic pioneers who forged into nowhere to tame this pocket of the Great Plains, was put away for four years.

And McGillicuddy City, brought to you by Sazerac of New Orleans, was born.

Pity the small farming community in the late 20th century. Predators abound: Corporate farms. Spotty harvests. No jobs. Bored kids. Population drift. Old age. Death.

All over the nation, such communities struggle to endure. Some simply fold. In Granville, population has dropped steadily; 443 people lived here in 1940, 400 in 1960 and only 236 in 1990, according to the North Dakota Blue Book (which is actually brown and white).

From nowhere to somewhere

Granville, a cattle-ranching and wheat-growing community built on a bed of gravel, was the kind of place that inspired the Hollywood frontier legend. Settled along the Great Northern Railway, it turned a nowhere into a somewhere - a farming center replete with grocery store, clothier, grain elevators, even a furniture store that doubled as the town funeral parlor. Granville Dodge, a civil engineer for the railroad, lent his name to the community.

But the economy faltered. America urbanized. A 1976 town history was entitled, "Granville: A Community Which Refused to Die." People kept leaving, winnowing the community's core to a few determined men and women. They were ready for some serious civic CPR, but Granville's pulse was weak.

Then the doctor made his house call.

Dr. McGillicuddy's isn't the most popular schnapps in the land. But it has its aficionados, many of them on the wintry, thinly populated plains of Dakota and western Minnesota. That was the region Sazerac, a family-owned importer that dates to the mid-19th century, had in mind when its president tossed out The Idea at a 1996 meeting down in Louisiana.

Sazerac issued a press release: It wanted a little town with at least six months of snow and a tavern willing to rename itself the Shady Eye Saloon, after the McGillicuddy bottle-label legend.

The community had to be near an airport and have lodging "in case we wanted to use the city for a promotional contest or sweepstakes," explains Sazerac national brand manager Rebecca Green. For four years, it had to be - in spirit, self-promotion and signage if not in legality - McGillicuddy City.

The town would get $100,000 in four annual payments for civic improvement - no pittance, considering Granville's annual budget last year was $13,212.

A handful of communities responded, and the field narrowed to two - Granville and Streeter, N.D. Then Granvillians got the news: They'd won. They'd be that much closer to getting the new civic center they wanted.

Signs went up on U.S. 2 outside town: "McGillicuddy City USA - Where The Fun Never Ends." City Hall's Web site now says, "We used to be Granville." Overnight, Dr. McGillicuddy Root Beer - another of the company's products - became de rigueur on Main Street.

Calvin Medler, proprietor of the Branding Iron - where pickled turkey gizzards cost $1 and the tap-beer menu features Busch Light, Bud Light, Miller Lite, Coors Light, Schmidt Light and, for a little variety, Keystone Light - became proprietor of the Shady Eye.

People trickled in, from the East Coast, from Seattle, from all over. Folks from Japan called to talk with the people of the plains town that renamed itself after a schnapps.

Few here worry; the temperance crowd grumbled at first, but now virtually everyone, even lifelong resident Anna Hillerud, 94, is giving the thing a chance.

Besides, says Mayor Hilman Ulland, "Simply because it's the name of a schnapps doesn't mean everybody in town has to drink it. People who work for Ford don't all drive a Ford."

But McGillicuddy's siblings dot the land. Suburban Boston has Premium Outlets Boulevard. San Francisco's venerable Candlestick Park is now 3Com Park; in Jackson, Tenn., money from Procter & Gamble will name a minor-league baseball stadium Pringles Park.

Granvillians, abundantly optimistic, see McGillicuddy as a hook that leads visitors to their prized traits: small-town living, bed-and-breakfast hospitality, buffalo ranching, street dances.

A city resurrected

Angie Bachmeier, proprietor of A Bar C and Big Sky, drives around town to tour the civic resurrection. Look, she says - there's where our new $800,000 civic center will be. There's the old bank building, which closed years ago; it's been bought, and a bed-and-breakfast may open. Next year, she enthuses, an 1890s-style tent fair is planned. And after so long, the town's population is rising again - if only by a handful.

Ulland, who as school principal saw too many kids grow up and leave, sees a bright future, too: more housing, more people, more jobs, like the days when U.S. 2 was a stoplight on Main Street, not a four-lane outside town.

The town post office, school, official road signs still use the old name. City Hall letterhead bears both. And behind it all, descendants of pioneers scrap out a new future.

These are the sort who will always be here, long after the schnapps runs out and the four years of McGillicuddyhood are a memory.

"In some ways, the greatest sign of success on the Great Plains is to be buried here," says Steve Schou, the town's Lutheran minister. "That's why you see so many cemeteries here and so few towns. Because if you're buried here, you've survived."