By Cheryl Boyum Eaton
Peterson Station Museum
Board Vice President
Mabel Seeley wrote her third murder mystery in January 1940. It was published by Doubleday & Company of New York City and distributed nationally by the Crime Book Club. The setting for this novel was a place called Cup. In the novel, its main character, Solveig, has just returned to Cup after living and working in Minneapolis. Shortly after her return, her best friend in Cup is murdered and her body found in the grain elevator.
Where is Cup? Ruth Rogers, a news editor for the Winona Daily News, wrote an article that was published in the July 15, 1961, issue. “Where’s Cup? Take Highway 43 from Winona to Rushford, turn right on Highway 16, travel several miles up the road – and there to the right is Cup, better known as Peterson, Minnesota.”
So, what connection did author Mabel Seeley have to Peterson that made her familiar with the town and elevator? She was born Mabel Hodnefield at Herman, Minn., on March 25, 1903. Her mother, a Peterson native, Alma Thompson, grew up on a farm about three miles northwest of Peterson off Highway 25. Mabel and her family often visited her maternal grandparents Fredrick and Helga Thompson, and other aunts and uncles that lived in the Peterson area.
Mabel’s father, a teacher and at one time a librarian at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, instilled a love of reading in Mabel, and after high school Mabel received a scholarship to this university. After college graduation, she married Kenneth Seeley in 1926 and moved to Chicago where she worked for an advertising agency. They moved back to Minnesota when her husband contracted tuberculosis, and Mabel started writing.
She published her first novel in 1938, “The Listening House.” All her novels are set in places she had lived or visited. Mabel took the title of “The Whispering Cup” from the steep hillsides surrounding Peterson and the wind “whispering” in the valley, especially in the grain elevator. This elevator was 85 feet tall, three and a half stories and a basement. The mill was built in 1876 and operated as a steam powered flour mill until it went broke in 1879. Later, it was operated as a grain elevator. The mill was torn down in 1948 when brothers Clifford and Maynard Benson bought the business and rebuilt. The only remaining structure of the 1876 mill is the tall brick chimney that was built by an early Peterson resident, Even Paulson Quickstad. The chimney can be seen towering over downtown Peterson just behind Burdey’s Cafe.
Mabel’s uncle, Eugene Highum, operated the grain elevator in the late 1920s and gave Mabel a tour of all its bins and trap doors. This inspired her to write a novel based in Peterson. “The Whispering Cup” was a bestseller, as were several of her other novels. In 1941, she won the Mystery of the Year award for her novel “The Chuckling Fingers.”
Mabel wrote a total of seven novels, all but one were set in the Midwest. In “The Whispering Cup,” she used several surnames that are familiar to Peterson people: Olness, Gilbertson and Gorder, to name a few. All her characters were based on people she met in the Peterson area, using only one of their characteristics so they could not be identified.
According to the Minneapolis Star dated August 20, 1940, “‘The Whispering Cup’ was recently sold to MGM for a motion picture in which Rosalind Russell will appear.” I have been unable to verify if it was ever produced. In 2021, many of her novels were re-released.
References: The Winona Daily News and Minneapolis Star newspaper articles and the book “The Whispering Cup.”
