Washburn-Fair Oaks Mansion District

About this property

The Washburn-Fair Oaks Mansion District is a historic district in the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, centered on Washburn-Fair Oaks Park. The city of Minneapolis designated a district bordered by Franklin Avenue, Fourth Avenue South, 26th Street East, and First Avenue South. A smaller district, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, includes seven mansions along and near 22nd Street East. The development in the area was spurred by the desire of prominent families to move away from the central business district and to build larger and more elegant homes along what was the edge of town. Development began around the early 1870s and continued through about 1930. The houses within the district represent a number of popular architectural revival styles. The park itself is named for a now-demolished mansion known as Fairoaks. Built in 1884 by E. Townsend Mix, Fairoaks was one of the grandest Twin Cities mansions of its era. The house itself had 40 rooms and sat on a lavishly landscape lot two square blocks in size. It was built for William D. Washburn, a lawyer who moved to Minneapolis in 1857 and amassed a fortune in the family milling business. Washburn lived in the house until his death in 1912, at which point he willed the mansion to the Minneapolis Park Board. The park board ultimately found the mansion too expensive to maintain, so it was demolished in 1924. The Minneapolis Institute of Art building is located immediately south of the park. The site was formerly occupied by the Dorilus Morrison house, built in 1858 by a lumberman who moved from Maine and became a businessman in Minneapolis, as well as the city's first mayor. Clinton Morrison agreed to donate the old family estate to the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts. The house was demolished in 1911, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, designed by the New York firm of McKim, Mead, and White was completed in 1915. The neighborhood surrounding the mansion district is now home to many young professionals and artists. The Eugene Merrill House, at 2116 Second Avenue South, was built in 1884 by banker and lawyer Eugene Merrill, to designs by William Channing Whitney (1851–1945). The Merrill House is the oldest mansion in the district. Its rusticated red sandstone, bold massing, polygonal tower and characteristic clustered fenestration are marks of the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style. It is now owned by Rhett A McSweeney and is the offices of McSweeney/Langevin. The Gale Mansion, at 2115 Stevens Avenue South, was built in 1912 to designs in the Renaissance Revival style by Ernest Kennedy of Minneapolis. In 1855, the 40-acre (16 ha) tract had been purchased for $50. Water company records indicate that several smaller houses once occupied the Stevens Avenue site. The owner, Edward Chenery Gale, was the son of Minneapolis pioneer real estate broker Samuel Gale. His wife, Sara Belle Pillsbury, was a daughter of Governor John S. Pillsbury. The house, now owned by the American Association of University Women, is faced in Bedford limestone. Many modern features were part of the design: a central vacuum-cleaning unit, a kitchen at ground floor level, rather than secreted in the basement, an intercom system. The house was centrally heated with a coal furnace; the decorative fireplaces were infrequently used. In the garden stands a fountain with the sculpture Boy with a Duck by Frederick MacMonnies.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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