Everyone who tells the story of this house names two men. Edwin Hewitt, of Hewitt & Brown, drew it. Charles Duveen — “Charles of London” — filled it with English rooms that were centuries old before they crossed the Atlantic. Both are on our own walls, and both deserve the billing.

But somebody had to actually build the thing. Somebody had to sink the caissons, raise the steel, and then stand in a Minneapolis winter while five-hundred-year-old oak panelling was fitted to a frame that had been poured the year before. That name is not on the walls. It is on a yellow index card.

The first line on the card

The City kept a permit card for every address. Ours is headed 100-06 E. 22nd St., Lot 6, in Pond & Pettibone’s Addition — and stamped, in a later hand, with the name of an owner who would not arrive for nearly thirty years: the Northwestern Lutheran Theological Seminary. Cards outlast families.

The top entry is the house itself:

• Permit no. B 96936
• Construction. “87×78.2 Ston. & Reinforced Conc. Dwlg.”
• Date. 3-12-12 — the twelfth of March, 1912
• Contractor. H. N. Leighton Co.
• Cost. $75,000

The trades follow within days and weeks. A. W. Scott took the plumbing on 19 March 1912 for $7,000. Pierson-Wilcox Electric wired it from May 1912, at $3,000, and came back twice more in 1913. Clarence H. Jerdee added another $3,000 of electrical work in September 1913. You can watch a house being built by reading down a column of dates.

Who was H. N. Leighton Company?

The City of Minneapolis still names them. Its landmark record for the Charles S. Pillsbury House gives the construction date as 1912–1914 and the contractor as the H.N. Leighton Company — the same firm as on the card.

What makes that interesting is the rest of their portfolio. Leighton built the Advance Thresher and Emerson-Newton Plow buildings — 1900 and 1904, designed by Kees and Colburn for the manufacture of farm machinery, with brick and terracotta walls and broad projecting cornices in the Chicago Commercial style that Louis Sullivan had made the local dialect. In 1910 they built the Northern Implement Co. Building, Kees and Colburn again, Sullivan again. All three are City landmarks today.

So the firm that arrived at 100 East 22nd Street in March 1912 was a heavy-industrial contractor. Their working life had been warehouses on the flats: floor loads, freight doors, terracotta, plate glass. And they were handed an English Gothic manor that had to receive genuine Elizabethan interiors, carved oak and a staircase from Herefordshire — which may be exactly why they were chosen.

A dwelling described in the language of a warehouse

Look again at that construction column: 87 by 78.2, stone and reinforced concrete dwelling. That is not how anyone describes a home. But it is precisely accurate. As our own account of building the mansion sets out, the house stands on a structural steel frame set on concrete caissons, and every wall and floor is reinforced concrete, masonry or structural tile. That is why the ceilings are as high as they are and why rooms span as far as they do without a post in the middle. A warehouse contractor was not an odd choice for that. He was the obvious one.

What $75,000 does and does not mean

Seventy-five thousand dollars was the permit valuation of the structure — the shell, the frame, the stone. It is not what the finished house cost, because the most expensive things in it were not built here at all. They were bought in England, dismantled, shipped and reassembled, and that trade ran through Charles Duveen rather than through any contractor’s bid.

For scale: the Minneapolis Star reported in March 1940 on the imported chimneypiece that had cost $50,000 — the one William Randolph Hearst had ordered and, by the importer’s mistake, never received. One fireplace, at two-thirds the permit valuation of the entire building. That is the ratio that explains this house. You can see what the money bought in the splendors.

The dates do not agree, and we are not going to pretend they do

Four sources, four beginnings:

• The permit card is dated 12 March 1912.
• The City’s landmark record gives construction as 1912–1914.
• Our own history dates the mansion’s rise to 1914–16 and its completion to 1916.
• And the Minneapolis Journal, in January 1912, reported that Charles S. Pillsbury “will resume construction begun four years ago” — which puts a first start somewhere around 1908.

These are not all errors with one survivor. A house of this kind has several beginnings: a decision, a first excavation, a permit, a frame, a roof, and then years of fitting rooms that arrived in crates. The permit records the day the City was told. It does not record the day Charles Pillsbury started thinking about it.

Forty years of tradesmen

The card does not stop in 1914. It runs on down the years in other hands. Electrical and plumbing work in 1930. An alteration in 1940, the year after Charles’s death, as the house changed use. A gas motor and mechanical work in 1942. Stokers installed in 1945 and 1948, a boiler repaired in 1949, a last stoker repair in 1951 — a decade of a big house being coaxed through Minnesota winters by a rotating cast of heating engineers.

By then the seminary had the building. You can follow that succession, and the ones after it, in the owners. The house entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1974, and it is still standing because a series of people kept paying tradesmen to keep it standing.

A permit card is a strange kind of biography. No adjectives, no anecdotes, just names and dollars in a column. But it is the only document in the house’s file written entirely by the people who did the work.

Come and see what Leighton built

The steel frame is invisible and the caissons are under your feet, but the spans they made possible are the first thing you notice walking in. Guided tours run year round — details are on experiences and tours and plan your visit. Minneapolis Trolley Tours depart from the mansion, and if you would rather sleep in a historic house than merely tour one, 300 Clifton is a few minutes away in Loring Park.

Keep reading: What Was Upstairs in the Pillsbury Mansion? and What Was a Flower Room?

Keep reading: What Was in the Basement of the Pillsbury Mansion?