Sauk Centre (/sɔːk/ SAWK)[7] is a city in Stearns County, Minnesota, United States.

Sauk Centre is the birthplace of Sinclair Lewis, a novelist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

It inspired his fictional Gopher Prairie, the setting of Lewis's 1920 novel Main Street.

The eight original town shareholders submitted suggestions for a name, and Sauk Centre was selected.

The name was submitted by Alexander Moore, who originally bought and platted the town.

[9] Centre (the British spelling of "center") refers to the town's central location between Sauk Rapids and Lake Osakis.

[10] Local lore has it that five refugees from the Sauk tribe had been killed by settlers in an ambush on the shores of Lake Osakis 17 miles (27 km) away.

[11] Sauk Centre contains the Sinclair Lewis Boyhood Home, a National Historic Landmark.

Holy Family is a Catholic private school; it enrolls students from kindergarten to 6th grade.

The mascot of Sauk Centre Public Schools is the Mainstreeters, in honor of Lewis' novel.

[16] A violent local incident in 1996, where the elderly Paul Crawford shot and killed four members of the neighboring Schloegl family over a property dispute, was featured in the episode "Lake of Madness" on the Investigation Discovery series Fear Thy Neighbor.