On Sunday, August 10, 1913, the Minneapolis Journal gave the top of page 23 to a street. “Three Mansions, Aggregating $300,000 in Cost, Art Marvels, to Face Art Museum,” the headline ran, over three photographs and a subhead naming the houses: Gale, Pillsbury and Dalrymple, “fitting additions to Washburn Hill.” One of the three is the house you can tour today. The other two were its neighbours, and the article is the only place we have found where all three are described together, by someone standing on the sidewalk while they were still going up.

A hill with rules

The Journal’s reporter opened with the setting. Three houses that “in architectural design, structure and furnishings, are mansions” had risen on Washburn Hill in the previous year, “where the home of the late Senator William Drew Washburn stands and the new art museum is going up.” The reporter credited the neighbourhood’s character to “the rigid rules that have long operated to exclude houses of cheaper construction,” which had made it “one of the most aristocratic parts of Minneapolis.” Those rules were real; we have written about the deed restrictions Charles Pillsbury bought into in 1901, and about the permission he needed to vary them. The Washburn house was Fair Oaks, across the street; the museum was the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which the City’s own Washburn-Fair Oaks Historic District profile dates to 1913–1915, designed by McKim, Mead and White.

The Gale house: finished first, and still standing

The first of the three described is Edward C. Gale’s, at Twenty-second Street and Stevens Avenue, “after plans by Ernest C. Kennedy,” built “of Bedford stone, in French Renaissance style.” The Journal calls it “now complete” and “one of the most beautiful in Minneapolis,” with an interior “richly finished and furnished” and “a pipe organ in the music room.” The paper puts the three houses’ average cost at $100,000.

That house is the Gale Mansion, at 2115 Stevens Avenue, and it is still there, a block from the Pillsbury Mansion. Its own history page agrees with the Journal on Kennedy, on the Bedford limestone and on the organ, which it places in the alcove of the great hall, but it calls the style Italian Renaissance Revival rather than French; the 1913 reporter and the present owners disagree, and we leave both on the record. The Gales were family: Sarah Belle Pillsbury Gale was a daughter of Governor John S. Pillsbury, and the couple were early leaders of the Institute of Arts across the way. Both died in 1943. The Minneapolis branch of the American Association of University Women bought the house in 1947 for $50,000, and it went on the National Register in 1977.

The Dalrymple house: brick, English, and a room for amusements

The third house is the one almost nobody remembers. The Journal’s photograph is captioned “Wm Dalrymple, Marquette Ave S,” and the text says Dalrymple was “finishing a home of modern English design, the plans for which were drawn by William R. Kenyon.” It was “built of brick,” had “an attractive amusement room in the basement and a fine garage in the rear,” and was “an ornament to the neighborhood.” That is the whole of it. The paper does not give a first name beyond the initials, and our own files have nothing more on the house or its owner, so we will not guess at what became of it. If you know, we would like to hear.

The reporter then added up the bill. The three homes “will have cost collectively, when completed, not the $250,000 that was originally expected, but probably, in all, closer to $300,000. There were some changes and additions made in each after the plans were under way.” Anyone who has built a house will recognise the sentence.

And the house in the middle

Between them, the Journal placed “the home of Charles A. Pillsbury,” a slip of the pen, since Charles A. had died in 1899 and the builder was his son Charles S., as the photo caption correctly says. The house, “also of Bedford stone,” was “incomplete, but Edwin H. Hewitt, who designed it, hopes to have it ready for occupancy in the near future.” File that alongside the December 1913 clipping that called it “the new home” and the 1916 date most sources give for completion: the record disagrees with itself about when the Pillsburys moved in, and this August 1913 line belongs in the argument without settling it.

What the reporter chose to dwell on, though, was not the stone. It was the wood. Under the heading “Aged English Oak Imported,” the article explains that “English oak, not a piece of it less than 200 years of age,” taken “from old mansions of England,” was going into the library, hall, living and dining rooms; that “Mr. Hewitt, C. J. Charles of New York, who is at present in London, and Mrs. Pillsbury selected the panelings”; that the panels were “split and worked down with adze and plane to get the grain,” with “no sawed panels in the house”; that the dining-room panels were “of the time of Henry VIII”; that the floors were teak “laid in broad planks”; and that “several hundred odd pieces of leaded glass” were coming. C. J. Charles is Charles of London, and the story of how all that oak entered the country “without paying duty, classed as art” has its own post. What is new here is the company the house was keeping: a newspaper that, in August 1913, already saw the Pillsbury Mansion as one of three art marvels on a single hill, facing a museum that did not yet have a roof.

Walk the hill

Of the three, one is a wedding venue, one is a question mark, and one is open for guided tours year-round. The museum across the way is still there and still free. Come see the oak the Journal described before it was even installed, then walk a block to Stevens Avenue and look at the neighbour that finished first. Plan your visit, and read more of what the newspapers said in the History Journal.

Keep reading: How Did the Pillsbury Mansion’s Stained Glass Cross the Atlantic? A 1913 Wire Story From Kansas