Every story about the ancient glass in the Pillsbury Mansion’s windows says the same thing: it came from Salisbury, through the London dealer Grosvenor Thomas, to Charles of London’s showroom in New York, and from there to Minneapolis. What none of them says is how it got across the ocean, or when, or that the crossing was news in a small Kansas river town. A single clipping in our archive answers all three, and it names the ship.

The clipping: Leavenworth, Kansas, January 16, 1913

Page five of The Leavenworth Times for Thursday, January 16, 1913 carries a short wire item under the headline “Finest Stained Glass in World Bound for U.S.” The dateline is London, January 15. The famous Grosvenor Thomas collection of stained glass, it says, “unquestionably the finest and most representative private collection in the world,” was shipped “yesterday” aboard the President Lincoln for New York, “where its treasures are to be exhibited at the Charles gallery.” The collection, the story adds, “consists of about three hundred panels.”

Three things in those few lines are new to this journal. The date: the glass left England on January 14, 1913. The scale: roughly three hundred panels in one shipment. And the destination, “the Charles gallery,” which is Charles Joel Duveen’s Fifth Avenue premises, the dealer this house knew as Charles of London.

What the wire story called the prize of the collection

The reporter singled out one group: “a series of eleven large panels in a wonderful state of preservation” that Grosvenor Thomas had acquired from a house the paper prints as “Kitburn Grange,” and which had “turned out to be of Flemish fifteenth century origin and of great historical importance,” identified as “the portraits and heraldic achievements of the Emperor Maximilian and members of his family.” We reproduce the spelling as printed; wire copy of the period mangled English place names freely, and we have not been able to confirm the house.

To be clear about what this clipping does and does not prove: it establishes that the Maximilian panels crossed on the same ship as the rest of the collection. It does not say where they went afterward, and nothing in this house is identified as one of them. The Flemish glass we can point to in these windows is later, the 1660 Feast of Esther and the Swedish kings, and the heraldic roundels traced to Costessey Hall in Norfolk. Charles S. Pillsbury bought from the three hundred; the Maximilian eleven, as far as the record shows, went elsewhere.

The ship that carried it

A German liner with an American name

The President Lincoln of January 1913 was a Hamburg-America Line steamer, not an American one. The U.S. Navy’s official ship history records that she was completed by Harland & Wolff of Belfast on May 14, 1907, launched as the Scotian, sold almost at once to the Hamburg line, renamed Berlin, and renamed again President Lincoln: 619 feet long, 14.5 knots, an Atlantic workhorse built to carry emigrants and cargo between Hamburg and New York. In the winter of 1913 her hold carried, among everything else, some three hundred panels of medieval and Renaissance glass packed for a Fifth Avenue debut.

What became of her

Five years later she was gone. When the United States entered the war in April 1917 the ship was seized in New York harbor, her German crew having damaged her before internment, and she was repaired, commissioned into the Navy and put to work carrying troops to France. On the morning of May 31, 1918, homebound from Brest, she took three torpedoes from the German submarine U-90 and sank in about half an hour. Twenty-six of her crew were lost; one officer, Lieutenant Edouard Isaacs, was taken prisoner, escaped, and received the Medal of Honor. The glass that had crossed in her hold was by then set into the windows of a house on 22nd Street in Minneapolis.

Why a Kansas paper cared

Leavenworth had no stake in the glass. The item ran because it came over the wire and filled a column, next to a patent-medicine advertisement and a note about “famous stage beauties.” That is the point. In January 1913 the Grosvenor Thomas sale was a national news event, the kind of story an editor in a Missouri River town assumed his readers would want. Duveen had made old glass fashionable; the shipment was its arrival. Within months the buyers named on our Splendors page, Vanderbilt, Hearst, Guggenheim, Getty and Pillsbury, had picked the exhibition over, and the Minneapolis share was on its way west.

The timing fits the house. Construction on the mansion had only resumed in 1912 after a four-year pause, so the glass was bought for windows that did not yet exist, then installed as the house rose. It is one more reason the completion date is argued over; a December 1913 newspaper already called this “the new home,” while the usual date is 1916, and this journal has left that conflict standing rather than pick a side.

Reading the small print

Finds like this come from reading digitised newspapers page by page rather than searching for the mansion by name; the Leavenworth item never mentions Minneapolis at all. The Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub is the free place to start for the local papers, and the mansion’s National Register listing of 1974 is the reason so much of the paper trail was gathered in the first place. The ship is the detail we will keep. Next time you stand in front of the amber roundels on a winter afternoon, you can add one line to their story: they came over on a German liner in the second week of January 1913, and the liner did not come back.

The glass is easiest to see on a guided mansion tour, when the daylight is behind it. Book a tour of the Pillsbury Club and ask your guide to point out the Salisbury panels.