The town of Sayner promotes itself as the “birthplace of the snowmobile” and the community has a legitimate claim to that title. However, as with so many historical topics, the story is a bit more complicated than that. Carl Eliason’s hand-built 1924 motor toboggan is on display in Sayner’s Snowmobile Museum, and Eliason’s design was the prototype for the modern snowmobile. While Eliason’s model became the most successful, it was not the first, and Northwoods residents experimented with all