The Pioneer Cooperage Company of Chicago designed the Pickle Barrel House, a small vacation cottage that stood on the shores of nearby Sable Lake from 1926 until about 1937 and was built for William Donahey, creator of the Chicago Tribune cartoon story The Teenie Weenies. Constructed like a typical barrel on a much larger scale, the main barrel contained a living area on the first floor and a bedroom on the second, while a pantry connected it to a smaller single-story barrel that housed a kitchen. Donahey spent ten summers there with his wife, Mary, a noted author of children’s books. The structure was later moved to its current site and used as a tourist information center, and it is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Donahey’s widely syndicated comic The Teenie Weenies debuted in the Chicago Tribune in 1914 and continued until his death in 1970, featuring miniature people living among life-sized objects that were enormous to them. The popularity of these characters led to a contract with the Chicago firm of Reid, Murdoch and Company, which hired Donahey to create packaging and advertising for its food products. The Pickle Barrel House was a large-scale version of the miniature oak casks in which the company’s Monarch-brand pickles were sold and likely was intended as an advertisement for those pickle products. Teenie Weenie books were translated into several languages, and over one million copies were sold worldwide.