Minneapolis has more than one Pillsbury house. Besides the Elizabethan manor on East 22nd Street, there was another building that carried the family name for six decades and, by one account, drew more than 200,000 visits in a single year. It was a settlement house, and it stood in a very different part of town. This is its story, as the sources we can check tell it.

What Was Pillsbury House in Minneapolis?

Pillsbury House was a settlement house: a neighborhood center, part of the late-nineteenth-century settlement movement, that offered services and clubs to working families. Locals called it “Pill House.” According to Augsburg University’s Cedar-Riverside digital tour, it began in 1879 as the Plymouth Mission, organized by women of Plymouth Congregational Church to help children and mothers from working-class immigrant families. It first operated downtown and moved to the Seven Corners area in 1883 after the Milwaukee railroad expanded.

Plymouth Congregational’s own history page confirms the church’s wider habit of mission work. It says church leaders began Sunday schools and missions for Scandinavian immigrants and other people in need from the 1870s onward, and that several of them grew into churches and community centers.

When Did the Pillsbury Name Come In?

The Augsburg tour says that in 1905, “Charles and John Pillsbury” donated money for a permanent building at 320 Sixteenth Avenue South, and that the center was renamed Pillsbury House. It does not say which Pillsburys those were, and we have not found a source that does.

Here is what we can safely say. Our own profile of Charles A. Pillsbury notes that a Pillsbury settlement house was founded in Minneapolis in his memory after he died in 1899. He left twin sons, Charles Stinson and John Sargent Pillsbury, born in 1878. Charles S. Pillsbury is the man who built the mansion on East 22nd Street; the twins would have been about twenty-seven in 1905. The names fit, and it would be natural to read the gift as the sons honoring their father. But that is an inference, not something the Augsburg page states, so we are leaving it as a likely reading and not a fact.

What Went On Inside the Settlement House?

The Augsburg tour lists a wide program: youth and adult clubs, concerts, theater, choirs, dances, festivals, a gym and neighborhood socials. It also describes food, shelter, childcare, education, employment training, and English and citizenship classes, and says the building hosted civic events, including draft and alien registrations during both world wars. By its account, in 1933 more than 200,000 people visited and over 160 groups met there every week. Those are the tour’s figures; we have not been able to confirm them from a second source.

A separate listing from the University of Minnesota’s Houses of Worship project describes the Plymouth mission differently. It says the mission was established by Plymouth Congregational Church in 1879 and reorganized as Bethel Settlement in 1897, with a day nursery for working mothers, an employment bureau and a kindergarten. We cannot say from these two pages alone how the Bethel name and the Pillsbury name relate, so we are not trying to reconcile them.

How Did the Building End?

Augsburg’s account says that in 1968 the building, slated for demolition for a highway, was destroyed by a mysterious fire and then torn down. Residents of the new Cedar Square West then asked for youth programs, which led to the one-story Currie Center, named for longtime head resident Ed Currie and operated by Pillsbury-Waite Neighborhood Services. That story is the freeway-era pattern that erased much of old Minneapolis, which we touched on in Where Else in Minneapolis Will You Find the Pillsbury Name?, where we noted the institution carried on under the same name.

Why Does It Matter for the Mansion?

The mansion on East 22nd Street was a private house for people of enormous means. Pillsbury House shows the other side of the family’s name in the city: a building open to immigrant families and children, paid for in part by the same fortune. If you want the wider picture, our Pillsbury family page is a good place to start, and you can step inside the house itself on a mansion tour at the Pillsbury Club.

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Keep reading: Why Is There a Pillsbury Academy in Owatonna? How a Minneapolis Miller’s Gifts Renamed a Baptist School