For roughly four years, the finest address on Washburn Hill was a hole in the ground.

Charles S. Pillsbury had bought his corner in 1901, dug a basement around 1908, and then stopped. The excavation sat open through four Minneapolis winters while the neighbours built their houses around it. When he finally resumed in 1912, a document had to be filed with the register of deeds first — because Charles Pillsbury, one of the richest men in the city, did not have a free hand on his own land.

The most novel residence scheme in Minneapolis

The rules came from a woman almost nobody remembers. In June 1901 the Minneapolis Daily Times reported that Miss Florence A. Pettibone, who owned the property, had engaged the architect Ernest Kennedy to devise a plan for two double blocks she held between First and Stevens avenues. Kennedy travelled to St. Louis, studied the private places being laid out there, and brought the idea home.

The paper called it “one of the best residence schemes that has ever been tried in Minneapolis,” and noted the plan was “a novel one in this country, and has been tried in but few places.” Each block was divided into just ten lots — corners of 136 by 132 feet, interiors 100 by 132. Ten houses, and no more, would ever stand there.

What you could and could not build

The land was sold under covenants, not suggestions. According to the 1901 report, a buyer agreed that the lots could never be subdivided once laid out; that building line easements would be observed; that houses had to be of harmonious architectural design, built of brick or stone, and cost not less than $10,000; that no outhouses, barns or sheds of any kind were allowed; and that every house had to be a first-class private residence — no boarding houses, no flats.

The prices matched the ambition. The lots sold at $125 a front foot, which the Times called the highest price paid for residence property in the city in a good many years. The corner lots went for $17,000 cash apiece.

The private park nobody was meant to see

The strangest provision is the one that has vanished most completely. There were to be no driveways into the interior of the block and, remarkably, no back yards at all. The entire centre of the block was to be a private park — fountains, shrubbery, trees and walks — held jointly by the owners of the abutting houses, maintained by a small frontage tax and cared for by a board of trustees elected each year.

A high stone wall topped with ornamental railings was to screen it from the street, and there was to be no way in at all except through the houses themselves or by the servants’ entrances. Between the two Pillsbury residences, in place of that wall, the plan called for “a highly ornamental winter garden.”

It was a garden with a guest list.

Three names on one block

The buyers that spring tell you everything about who Minneapolis flour money belonged to. Alfred F. Pillsbury, son of the governor John S. Pillsbury, took a lot on Stevens Avenue. Charles S. Pillsbury, son of the late Charles A. Pillsbury, took the corner of Twenty-second Street and First Avenue South. And John Crosby — of Washburn-Crosby, the great milling rival — bought the large lot adjoining Alfred’s, for $12,500 in cash.

The Pillsburys and the Crosbys competed for the world’s flour trade by day and shared a hedge by night. If you want a single image of how small the top of this city was in 1901, that is it. Across the way stood Fair Oaks, the Washburn palace that gave the park its name and did not survive the century.

Four years of nothing

Alfred built his large stone house. Crosby built. L. H. Farrington built. Charles S. Pillsbury, in the flat words of the Minneapolis Journal on 25 January 1912, “went no further than to begin excavation for the basement.”

The reason was domestic rather than financial. Charles had been living with his brother John S. Pillsbury in the old C. A. Pillsbury homestead directly across Twenty-second Street. There was no urgency to move. Then John married, the old house became his, and Charles — as the Journal put it — resolved to “carry out a plan he has had in mind for years.” Hewitt & Brown had drawn the plans; contractors were preparing to bid.

The exception, filed with the register of deeds

And here is the sentence that explains the whole story. “The block is under the most strict building community regulations in the city,” the Journal wrote, “and a document was recently filed with the register of deeds permitting Mr. Pillsbury to make a slight change from the regulations.”

The paper does not say which rule was bent, and we have not found a source that does. What it does establish is that the covenants had teeth. Even a Pillsbury, building on Pillsbury land in a district his family had helped create, had to go on the public record to depart from the neighbourhood’s rules by a hair. Anyone who has ever argued with a homeowners’ association will recognise the shape of it — only this one was drafted in 1901 and enforced against the flour barons themselves.

Seventy-five thousand dollars, and a very quiet Wednesday

The permit came through that spring. On 13 March 1912 the Minneapolis Journal‘s building-permits column led with a single line: “C. S. Pillsbury, 106 East Twenty-second street, two and one-half-story stone and reinforced concrete dwelling . . . $75,000.” (The house is known today as 100 East Twenty-second Street; the permit was filed under the older number.)

Read the rest of the column and the scale lands. Every other permit issued in Minneapolis that day — five houses, a set of brick-veneer flats, and eleven minor permits — came to $20,700 between them. The city’s total for the day was $95,700. One house on Washburn Hill accounted for nearly four dollars in every five.

That $75,000 bought stone and reinforced concrete — a frame more like a commercial building than a residence, which is why the mansion was engineered the way it was. It had to carry English rooms four centuries old. The architect, Edwin Hewitt, was building a container as much as a house.

What is left of the scheme

The private park was never fully realised as Pettibone drew it, and the wall with no doors is long gone. But the bones of 1901 are still legible if you walk East Twenty-second Street: ten generous lots that were never carved up, houses of stone and brick standing at a common building line, and no flats among them. The covenant outlived the woman who wrote it, the architect who planned it, and most of the families it was written for.

The mansion it produced is still here too — and it is one of four saved from the wrecking ball in the 1969–74 rescue that put them on the National Register of Historic Places together. The Minneapolis Institute of Art, across the park, grew out of the same generation’s ambitions. For the wider record on how these houses were built and furnished, see the Minnesota Historical Society; the National Trust for Historic Preservation explains how covenants and landmark status have preserved districts like this one elsewhere.

There is a version of this story where the four-year hole in the ground is an embarrassment. We prefer the other reading: a man waited until the house he had in mind was the house he could actually build, filed his paperwork, and then spent $75,000 on a single Wednesday in March.

Come and see what it bought. The mansion is open for guided tours year-round — details are on Plan Your Visit and Experiences & Tours — and the Pillsbury Club now occupies the rooms Charles Pillsbury waited four years to build. Sources for this piece: the Minneapolis Daily Times, 2 June 1901; the Minneapolis Journal, 25 January 1912 and 13 March 1912. More on the construction is at Building the Mansion, and on the house’s later custodians at The Owners.

Keep reading: How Did Charles Pillsbury Buy Back the Family Flour Company in 1924?