On Sunday, December 28, 1913, the Minneapolis Star Tribune ran a full page under the heading Making the Home Beautiful. That week’s subject was “The Perfect Pantry,” and after a few paragraphs of general advice — put it between the kitchen and the dining room, keep the woodwork plain and durable, give every article a place of its own — the writer reached for an example. The example was ours.

“A striking example of the best arrangement for the pantry,” the page said, “is shown in the new home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Pillsbury, 100 East Twenty-second street.”

What followed was not a puff piece. It was an inventory, precise enough that you can walk the room in your head more than a century later.

Twenty-eight doors and a wall of glass knobs

The woodwork was fumed oak in a plain finish — deliberately plain, in a house otherwise filled with carved English panelling centuries older than the building around it. Along one wall and across the ends of what the paper called a “rather large room” ran the china closet, its upper section built as fourteen small doors above and fourteen below, so that glassware, china or silver could be lifted out without reaching past anything else. Every door was fitted with a glass knob.

The contents were sorted by rank. One end held the better glassware — cut glass, crystal and Tiffany ware. The next cases held the better china, including the Tiffany-banded service in both dinner sets and individual pieces. The centre was given over to rows of silver. Everyday glass, china and silver lived at the far end, out of the way of the things brought out for company.

Below, the logic continued. The first lower compartment was for wines and cordials. Next to it, a large door opened on a space for table pads and silence cloths — the felt underlay that goes beneath a tablecloth to soften the sound of a plate being set down. Four long drawers held laundered linen. Small cases to the left held the old silver, and beneath those, doors opened on the large cut-glass pieces: punch bowls, bottles, pitchers.

The machinery on the opposite wall

Facing the china cases, two large doorways opened into copper-lined shelved cases. One was a warming closet. The other was for drying tea towels. Below them sat nickel sinks for washing dishes, fitted with faucets, drain boards, soap receptacles and drying racks. In the remaining corner stood a large warming oven with a pass-through above it opening into the kitchen — put there, the paper noted, to save time.

That pass-through is the whole philosophy of the room in one detail. A pantry of this kind is not storage. It is a staging area, built so that a plate could travel from the range to the table without anyone carrying it further than necessary, and so that a dinner for twenty could be served without the dining room ever hearing the kitchen.

The small room off the pantry

A smaller room opened off the pantry proper. It held its own china closet for the breakfast set and a dinner service of Berlin ware, a large case for soiled linen, drawers for silver, and further drawers for candy, nuts, spices and other table articles. Across from the china closet stood a large white enamel refrigerator with a tile top and a wine closet beside it.

The walls were light buff. The heating and ventilation were, in the writer’s judgement, the room’s most attractive features: a French window opened just above the radiator, and the room “is cooled off in an unusually short time” — which tells you something about how hot a room full of warming ovens got.

Not far off was the flower room, with cases for flowers and vases, a closet for cleaning utensils at one end and a sink at the other, and a large refrigerator held always at the same temperature so that cut flowers could wait there. We have written elsewhere about what a flower room was and where it sat on the original first-floor plan; what the newspaper adds is the refrigerator.

One date that does not sit still

Here is the part worth flagging rather than smoothing over. The mansion at 100 East Twenty-second Street is usually given a completion date of 1916. We have also written about the four years the house sat as an excavation and nothing more before construction resumed in 1912.

And yet here is a newspaper, at the end of December 1913, describing a finished pantry in “the new home of Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Pillsbury” in enough detail to count the doors. Both things are on the record. We are not going to resolve them by picking one — a large house is finished in stages, and a service wing may well be working while the great rooms are still receiving their imported panelling. But anyone who has been told a single tidy completion year for this building should know that the contemporary press was writing about its interiors three years earlier.

Why a pantry was worth a full newspaper page

In 1913 this was aspirational content, not celebrity gossip. The page ended by reassuring its readers that “a model pantry, though not so complete, is within the reach of all who desire one in their home, if simplicity and convenience are emphasized in the arrangement.” The Pillsbury pantry was printed as a standard to measure your own kitchen against.

It also documents something the house itself no longer says out loud. A room built to hold cut glass, Tiffany-banded china, old silver, punch bowls, table pads and silence cloths, with a dedicated closet for drying tea towels, describes a household with staff, and a way of entertaining that needed all of it. Our companion piece on what it actually took to run the mansion covers the people; this page covers their equipment.

Clippings like this one survive because Minnesota’s newspapers were digitised — the Minnesota Historical Society’s newspaper collections are where a great deal of what we know about these houses now lives. The mansion itself has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1974, and the fortune that paid for the fumed oak is the same one told at the Mill City Museum down on the river.

Come and stand in the room it served

The pantry has changed since 1913. The dining room it was built to serve has not, in any way that matters. You can see it on a guided mansion tour, or read more about the interiors in The Splendors before you come. Plan your visit — and count the doors for yourself.

Keep reading: Who Were the Pillsbury Mansion’s Neighbours on Washburn Hill in 1913?