When Brookings County’s best cook and premier pie maker Linda Carlson died last month, so did her iconic café in White in what was probably Brookings County’s oldest wood frame commercial building.

Linda was 71.

Her pride and joy, the historic Palace Café, was 126 when it was bulldozed to splinters a few weeks after Linda’s passing.

The two were among the town’s most beloved and best known.

Generations came and went in White, but the venerable, doddering old Palace Café was always there for them when they were back from wars or had just peacefully motored home to visit the folks.   

And for the last quarter century, despite expenses rising and customers dwindling, Linda kept The Palace going. She made the place hum with efficiency, good food and good company. 

Linda was White’s popular and peppy bundle of energy, taking occasional time out from the kitchen to wait on tables, run the clanging old cash register and exchange friendly jabs and broad smiles with the town’s jokers and jabsters.

Everyone gathered there to discuss the weather and the corn and soybean prices, enjoy the food and hot coffee, roll the dice to determine who pays, and just spend happy time with old friends. 

The Palace was built in 1893 when President Grover Cleveland resided in the White House, and a year before Brookings’ oldest remaining business building, the brick Masonic Lodge (now Trendz at Third and Main), was taking shape. 

In 1893, John Jamison of White planned for his new building to become the town’s hoity-toity opera house. He’d already acquired a drop curtain and some background scenery. But for reasons unknown it never made its cultural debut. 

So the building anchored at the west end of White’s main drag was instead destined to while away the good and the bad times for the next 12 decades serving a variety of roles.  

During its long tenure it served as a hotel with 10 steam-heated rooms and nightly rates from 50 cents to $1.50, a restaurant with a fancy dining room for private parties, and in about 1915, Dr. Gross bought it and the restaurant became his infirmary. He and his family lived in the hotel rooms on the second floor.  

Bert Bennett bought the structure in 1919 from Dr. Gross and revamped it to become a hotel once more. In 1937 Ed and Lila King purchased what until their arrival was the Park Hotel. They changed the name to the Palace Hotel and Café.

After several other owners tried and moved on, Linda and Don Carlson bought the building in 1995. Linda took on the café’s daily chores, and it became a popular place for good food, great gab and delicious homemade pies, cookies and donuts. Senior citizens took their noon meal at the Palace. After school, kids dropped in for a Coke or one of Linda’s special cinnamon rolls. 

On busy days, husband Dan helped serve. During lulls, he was the café’s visitor-in-chief. 

The old building during Linda’s tenure also remained an unadvertised hotel. Business was hardly brisk. In fact, the last to rent an upstairs room was White resident Dale Murphy. He and his new bride, Joanne Robbins, spent their honeymoon in a steam-heated Palace Hotel room on Oct. 1, 1999, during a raging Dakota blizzard.

Even before Linda’s time nursing the aging Palace along, it developed a noticeable lean to the east. Years of Dakota’s gales galloping along out of the northwest became an annual challenge for its aging timbers. 

The lean was hardly noticeable to customers who sat at one of the three 1950s chrome and vinyl kitchen tables, but if they looked closely, they could see the table was leveled by small wooden blocks scotched under table legs. 

Linda joked that the only other way her customers knew of the Palace’s gravitational proclivity was if a salad bowl should happen to lose a cherry tomato. It would roll due east after hitting the tilting floor. 

Today, sadly, both Linda Carlson and her slightly a’kilter Palace Café are gone.

White won’t ever be the same again.