Senator Rosenmeier's home from the side, now the Little Falls Visitors Center
Linden Hill - Weyerhaeuser house (green) and Musser house (white)
The two houses and acreage, now known as Linden Hill Lodging and Museum. were very interesting. Charles Weyerhaeuser, son of lumber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser, and Drew Musser, son of lumber baron Peter Musser, were tasked by their fathers with establishing the Pine Tree Lumber Company at Little Falls in 1891. Besides being very successful business partners, they became lifelong friends.
Little Falls was an ideal place for a lumber operation. Logs were floated down the Mississippi where they could be corralled at the dam to be sorted and moved over to the Great Northern railroad line. Some of the timber went through their mill here while some was shipped elsewhere. The Weyerhaeuser and Musser families became fabulously wealthy as they and others stripped all the old-growth forests from Minnesota. Out of millions of acres, only two small areas of old-growth pine are left.....28 acres in Itasca County and a small grove in Itasca State Park.
Charles and Drew bought 90 acres of land on the Mississippi just south of Little Falls. In spite of having so many acres, they built their houses so close together you can see into the windows of one from the windows of the other. Fortunately their wives were also good friends so it all worked out. The houses were built in 1898 while they were still bachelors.
Only the Weyerhaeuser house is open for tours; the Musser house is rented out for events. There are a lot of rooms in the Weyerhaeuser house but none are particularly large. If you eliminate the entire left side of the house which contained the servants' quarters, it doesn't look quite so big. The Musser house is much bigger because Drew planned on having a large family which didn't work out.
Weyerhaeuser living room
The most interesting object in the living room was the blue embroidered thing next to the fireplace that looks like a tray on a post. We've seen these in other houses of this era but never knew what they were. The tour guide explained that it's a face protector, designed to shield ladies' faces from the heat of the fire if they were sitting too close to it. Makeup back in those days contained wax so being close to the fire would make their makeup melt and run down their faces.
Weyerhaeuser dining room
The dark wood popular in houses of that era was a status symbol because it was much more expensive than light colored wood. All the areas of the house that would be seen by guests or was lived in by the family was decorated and furnished with dark wood. The servants' end of the house had light wood. In the picture the dining table and chairs were 1950's pieces in lighter wood because tastes had changed by then.
When the Weyerhaeusers eventually moved away Charles sold his house to Drew Musser for one dollar. When Mrs. Musser later died and left Drew on his own, he insisted their daughter Laura Jane move back to the estate. She was very involved in the art and music world having been educated at Julliard. When she returned to Little Falls she immediately moved out of the Musser house into the Weyerhaeuser house where she lived alone (with servants) for the rest of her life. (She never married.) She shut the door to her room in the Musser house and never went back. (Sounds like she and her father might not have got along too well.....maybe she resented being forced to give up her independent life in the East.) She was a great philanthropist and patron of the arts, bequeathing her estate to Little Falls where it could be used for the public good.
The rest of the afternoon was taken up with laundry. That's not a subject of much interest except that Camp Ripley has the best laundry we've ever been in.....lots of new machines in perfect working order, lots of space, clean and FREE. Amazing!
This evening we were treated to a WWII-era C130 doing touch-and-go's at the Camp Ripley air strip, making its approach nearly on top of the trees in the campground.
Tomorrow we're moving down to Apple Valley, just south of the Twin Cities.
No comments:
Post a Comment