100 East 22nd Street · Minneapolis
An authentic Elizabethan manor on the Minnesota prairie — built of English oak that crossed an ocean, and stories that crossed five centuries.
A House Unlike Any Other
When Charles Stinson Pillsbury set out to build his home on the edge of Washburn–Fair Oaks Park, he did not commission a mansion in the ordinary sense. He summoned England across the Atlantic. Whole paneled rooms saved from thousand-year-old English estates as they were being pulled down, a carved oak staircase a King had walked, a stone fireplace that survived the Great Fire of London, and stained glass that once glowed in an English cathedral — all of it shipped by steamer, hauled by rail and buggy, and reassembled here, in Minneapolis.
What rose at 100 East 22nd Street in 1916 was not a copy of a great English house. In many rooms, it was a great English house — its genuine, centuries-old fabric resurrected on the prairie. Today it stands as the last grand survivor of a vanished avenue of empire-builders’ homes, and quite possibly the most remarkable residence ever raised in the American Midwest.
*The Rotherwas estate, source of the staircase and paneling, was chronicled in the Domesday Book of 1086.
Five Centuries, One House
Rotherwas Court — future source of the staircase and oak rooms — is recorded in William the Conqueror’s great survey of England.
The Tallow Chandlers carve a stone chimneypiece for their London hall. It will survive the Great Fire of London in 1666.
John Walrond and Jane Hatch lavish a remodel on Bovey House, commissioning a fireplace crowned with their joined crests.
Dealer Charles Duveen dismantles the famous oak rooms, staircase and ceilings of Rotherwas — to England’s anguish — and ships them to America.
Charles S. Pillsbury builds his steel-framed manor at 100 East 22nd Street, reassembling the English interiors within.
Charles rescues the Pillsbury Company from bankruptcy and reinvents American food marketing.
After Charles’s death, the home is sold and becomes a Lutheran theological seminary — its racier stained glass quietly removed.
An anonymous donor helps the Society of Fine Arts rescue four threatened mansions; all four enter the National Register together in 1974.
The advertising agency restores and occupies the mansion through the 1980s and early ’90s.
The mansion becomes home to BLIND, Incorporated, a training center for people who are blind or visually impaired, for three decades.
The house enters a new chapter — its history finally told in full.
Explore the House
Steel bones, a master architect, and a dealer who sold England to America.
Charles and Nelle, four remarkable children, and a daughter who shaped the United Nations.
From a single mill to Betty Crocker’s rival, the Doughboy, and a global brand.
The treasures within — Rotherwas oak, a King’s staircase, ancient glass, and priceless fireplaces.
Pillsburys, priests, art patrons, ad men — and the lost mansions that did not survive.
If These Walls Could Talk
Go Deeper
Married at the mansion door — and Eleanor Roosevelt’s successor at the United Nations.
The man who stripped Rotherwas Court and shipped its treasures to Minneapolis.
The art-dealing family that sold Europe’s masterpieces to Gilded Age America.