On Wednesday, 6 November 1918, the Star Tribune ran a column headed simply “Women and War Work.” Five days later the guns would stop in France. Nobody reading that page knew it yet — and buried in the second paragraph is a sentence that tells you exactly what one room of the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion was being used for that autumn.

Over 1,257 garments for Belgian and French refugees are on display in the amusement room of Mrs. Charles S. Pillsbury’s home, 100 East Twenty-second street…

Not a ballroom. Not a reception. A room stacked to the walls with children’s clothes, waiting to be shipped across an ocean.

What was in the room

The paper is specific, in the way that newspapers of 1918 usually were. The lot included girls’ dresses, coats and bonnets, boys’ suits, and hundreds of pieces of underwear. A group of women working under the direction of Mrs. Pillsbury and a Mrs. Edith Daniels were sorting and packing it all, ready to ship overseas early the following week.

The garments had not simply been bought. Most had been remodelled — cut down, resewn and made over — by members of the five chapters of the Rebecca lodge. On top of the remade clothing there were 800 brand-new garments, sewn by members of the Daughters of the Revolution, by women of Trinity Methodist church, by the women of Robbinsdale, and by a group working out of the home of a Mrs. Fred Neiderloh.

Four separate volunteer networks, one destination. The mansion was the sorting floor.

An “amusement room” in a 1916 house

The phrase reads oddly now. In a house of this period an amusement room was the informal, uncarpeted, hard-wearing space — billiards, games, children, the room where you could make a mess. It is precisely the room you would choose if you had to spread 2,057 items of clothing across the floor and count them.

That is worth sitting with. The splendours of this house — the imported Rotherwas oak, the sixteenth-century chimneypieces, the ancient glass — had been installed barely two years earlier, when the family moved in. And in November 1918 the most useful room in it was the plain one.

Who Mrs. Charles S. Pillsbury was

Newspapers of the period rarely printed a married woman’s own name. “Mrs. Charles S. Pillsbury” was Helen Winston Pillsbury — Nelle — who ran this house and raised her children in it. Her daughter Mary, then fourteen, would grow up to take Eleanor Roosevelt’s seat at the United Nations and spend a career on refugees and human rights. It is difficult to read the 1918 column and not see where some of that started: an international relief career that began, in a sense, on the floor of her mother’s amusement room.

The rest of the column

What makes the clipping valuable is the company the Pillsbury house is keeping in it. The same column reports that Salvation Army women, working through their Red Cross unit, had finished ten boys’ suits and twenty boys’ shirts in a month — about ten women at a time in an assembly room on the first floor of the Salvation Army hotel at 216 Marquette Avenue. It reports that the Council of Jewish Women, working from the Hebrew Reform temple house at Emerson Avenue South and Twenty-fourth Street, had produced 2,000 surgical dressings over its allotment from Red Cross headquarters — pads, compresses and 600 contagion masks — while its garment division remodelled 551 army shirts, made ten pairs of pyjamas and fifty comfort bags in October alone.

Read together, the column is a map of a city’s war effort drawn in church halls, lodge rooms, temple houses and one very large private home on Twenty-second Street.

Five days short

The clothes were due to ship “early next week.” The Armistice was signed on 11 November. Whether that consignment left Minneapolis before or after the fighting stopped, the need did not end with it — Belgian and French children were no less cold in December 1918 than in November.

We do not know which room of the house it was. No floor plan labels an amusement room, and the family’s own history of the mansion does not name one. What we have is a sentence in a newspaper, and the certainty that somewhere behind those walls, for a few weeks in 1918, the finest English interior in Minnesota was full of second-hand children’s coats.

See the house

The mansion at 100 East 22nd Street still stands, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974, and it is open again — now as the Pillsbury Club. Guided tours run year-round; you can plan your visit or browse the experiences and tours on offer.

This clipping was found in the Minnesota Digital Newspaper Hub. If you want more of the city that built this house, the Mill City Museum tells the flour half of the story — and more of ours is in the History Journal and on our page about the Pillsbury family.

Keep reading: What was Christmas like at the Pillsbury Mansion in 1917?

Keep reading: Who Lectured on Babylonia Inside the Pillsbury Mansion in 1914?