On a Saturday in April 1927, readers of The Minneapolis Star turned to page 26 and found a young woman at the top of a golf swing. The headline above her read “Local Society Girl at Hot Springs.” The caption named her: Miss Helen Winston Pillsbury, of East Twenty-second Street.

She was the youngest daughter of the house we now call the Pillsbury Club. And the four sentences printed under her photograph answer a question this journal had never asked: where did the Pillsbury daughters go to school once they left the mansion?

Period photograph from 1909: Helen “Nelle” Pillsbury seated against oak panelling with four of her children in white dresses and hair bows, years before the daughters left Minneapolis for college in Massachusetts

What the 1927 caption actually said

The wording is worth having in full, because it carries more information than a photo caption usually does:

The picture shows a Minneapolis girl, Miss Helen Winston Pillsbury, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Pillsbury, of East Twenty-second street, enjoying a round of golf at Hot Springs, Va., where she is spending her spring vacation from Smith college, Northampton, Mass. Miss Pillsbury, with her two older sisters, Mary and Katherine Pillsbury, who also are Smith college students, accompanied Mr. and Mrs. Pillsbury to Hot Springs, where they will remain until early next week.

Three daughters. One college. All three enrolled at the same time, roughly 1,200 miles from the oak-panelled hall their father had built on Washburn Hill.

Three sisters at Smith, all at once

Mary Stinson Pillsbury was the eldest, and 1927 was her graduating year — she took her degree from Smith that spring. Katherine was next. Helen, still an underclasswoman when the photograph ran, was named on our own pages a decade earlier as one of the children who grew up inside the house.

Sending one daughter east to a women’s college in the 1920s was a statement. Sending three at once, and then travelling to Virginia to spend their spring vacation together, tells you something about how the family thought about its girls’ education — and about a household that could reorganise itself around an academic calendar 1,200 miles away.

Why Smith, and what Smith was in 1927

Smith College had been founded on the bequest of Sophia Smith, a New England woman who inherited a fortune at sixty-five and decided to spend it founding a college for women. Her will asked for “means and facilities for education equal to those which are afforded now in our colleges to young men.” The college opened in the autumn of 1875 with fourteen students and six faculty in Northampton, Massachusetts.

By the time the Pillsbury sisters arrived, Smith was one of the largest women’s colleges in the world, midway through the long presidency of William Allan Neilson (1917–39). Neilson had built the Georgian houses of “the Quad” so that every student could live on campus, and in 1924 he had launched the college’s Junior Year Abroad programme — one of the first of its kind in the country. A Minneapolis girl who went to Smith in the 1920s was walking into a genuinely cosmopolitan place.

Period photograph: the young Pillsbury children posed on a garden bench beneath trees, the girls in white with dark hair ribbons and dolls in their laps, long before three of the daughters enrolled together at Smith College

What it led to

It is tempting to read a photograph like this as pure Jazz Age leisure — a rich girl on a resort golf course during spring break. The record says otherwise. Mary graduated from Smith in 1927, went into family welfare work in Minneapolis, married Oswald Bates Lord in the great hall of this house in December 1929, and eventually took Eleanor Roosevelt’s seat as the United States representative to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. You can read her story in full on our Mary Pillsbury Lord page.

The Virginia golf swing and the UN delegation seat are not two different lives. They are the same one, thirty years apart, and the college in Northampton sits between them.

The house they came home to

Whatever the sisters did in Massachusetts, this was the address the newspapers printed after their names: East Twenty-second Street, Minneapolis. They came home each summer to a house their father had finished only a decade or so before they left it — a mansion whose panelling, staircase and fireplaces had been bought in England and reassembled here, through the London dealer known as Charles of London.

The drawing room and library of the Pillsbury Mansion in Minneapolis, where imported English panelling and antique glass were reassembled — the rooms the Pillsbury daughters came home to from college

The building of the mansion and the family who lived in it are both documented elsewhere on this site, and the house itself is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The 1927 clipping is a small thing next to all that. But it is the kind of small thing that turns a family into people: three sisters, one college, and a father who took them all to Virginia for a week in April.

See the rooms yourself

The great hall where Mary was married, the carved staircase the sisters came down, and the English rooms their father imported are all still here, at 100 East 22nd Street in Minneapolis. Guided mansion tours run year round — see experiences and tours or plan your visit. More stories from the archive are collected in the History Journal.

Source: The Minneapolis Star (Minneapolis, Minnesota), Saturday, 2 April 1927, page 26. Minnesota’s historic newspapers are searchable through the Minnesota Historical Society, whose Mill City Museum tells the story of the flour industry that paid for the house.

Keep reading: Who Was Christened Inside the Pillsbury Mansion in 1938?