Glensheen, the historic Congdon estate, stands on 12 acres of waterfront on Lake Superior at 3300 London Road in Duluth, Minnesota: a 39-room mansion in the Jacobean tradition with its own carriage house, gardener's cottage, boathouse and a private pier that has appeared on sailors' charts for more than a century. It was built between 1905 and 1908 for Chester and Clara Congdon, to the design of Clarence H. Johnston Sr., Minnesota's state architect, at a cost of $854,000.
The money was iron. Chester Congdon was a lawyer who stepped in to help the steel producer Henry Oliver with a land purchase on the Iron Range, and became his friend and attorney. When J.P. Morgan bought out the Iron Range interests in 1900 and formed U.S. Steel, Congdon became the wealthiest man in Minnesota; his stock went from $16 to $9,250 a share. Glensheen's director, Dan Hartman, traces it to a fight Congdon picked with Rockefeller.
Inside, William A. French Co. designed the rooms and the furniture together, in Late Victorian, Arts and Crafts, Federal and Art Nouveau styles, trimming each room in its own wood, Circassian walnut, mahogany, cypress, fumed oak or enamelled birch, and making the furniture from the same wood. Doors are oak on the hallway side and the room's wood on the other. The green Breakfast Room, with its acorn and oak-leaf tiles and running fountain, is a favourite. The furniture brought in during 1908 and 1909 still stands almost exactly where it was placed, and Chester Congdon's paintings hang as they did.
In 1968 the family gave the estate to the University of Minnesota Duluth, with a life estate for Elisabeth Congdon, Chester's youngest daughter. On 27 June 1977 she and her nurse, Velma Pietila, were murdered in the house. Roger Caldwell, the second husband of her adopted daughter Marjorie, was convicted of both murders; the conviction was overturned in 1982, and he then pleaded guilty and confessed. Marjorie was acquitted of aiding and conspiracy, and was twice convicted of arson in the years that followed. Partly because of the murder, Hartman says, there was no transitional period of changing ownership, and much of the furnishing is still there. The house opened as a museum on 28 July 1979 and joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1991. The murders have since inspired a 2015 musical, Glensheen.
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