It was a long, skinny town, shaped like a cigar, with the Mississippi on one side, and a long artificial lake called Lake Hoosac on the other. All around the town the land was as flat as a tabletop, but in the distance, on ether side, rose tall bluffs. The bluffs were very tall, six or seven hundred feet high, and they were covered with trees. The bluffs on the western side of the town were a long way away (in Wisconsin), but the ones on the eastern side were quite close [The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, 18-19].

The Name

We've deduced that the word Hoosac has its orgins in Massachusetts, specificially an Algonquian word for "place of stones." In Massachusetts is the Hoosac Mountain range that contains the Hoosac Tunnel, a 4.75-mile-long railroad tunnel running running east-west. Upon completion in 1875, it was the longest tunnel in North America and the second in the world. John had been living in Massacusetts for just over a decade when the book was published so it's not hard to believe he had heard of the name Hoosac or seen or heard about the tunnel.

Geological

Like Hoosac, the city of Winona lies atop a sand bar formed between two channels, the main channel of the Mississippi and Lake Winona, a secondary channel. This portion of the Mississippi runs from west to east.

In The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, various cities in Minnesota are shown to have heavier-than-normal amounts of snowfall. The melting snow, combined with heavy rain that spring, led to the danger of flooding in Hoosac. Efforts of citizen volunteers prevented the water from damaging the city through the use of sandbagging and dikes. The scene was similar in Winona in April 1965: late snow in March, atop the slowly melting snow from the previous winter months, and heavy rains led to rising rivers that endangered small communities along the Mississippi River in both Minnesota and Wisconsin. Over the course of April 9-20, the Mississippi rose to a record 20.9 feet, easily beating the record 17 feet held since 1952. The dikes from that flood would form the city's main defense system; after that flood, the city built a permanent 10.5-mile, 25-foot high dike and floodwall, which kept the city from flooding in 2001. Without that dike much of the city would have been under water.

Notable locations

• A & P
• First National Bank [The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, 24; The Dark Secret of Weatherend, 128]
• Hoosac High School [The Dark Secret of Weatherend, 27, 34; The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb, 12, 17, 58]
• Hoosac Public Library
• Immaculate Conception Academy [The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, 122, 128; The Dark Secret of Weatherend, 29]
• Levee Park [The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, 8, 80, 121, 139; The Dark Secret of Weatherend, 120; The Mansion in the Mist, 3]
• Monday's Cigar Store [The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, 4; The Dark Secret of Weatherend, 34; The Lamp from the Warlock's Tomb, 118]
• Winterborn House [The Treasure of Alpheus Winterborn, 56-7, 70-1]