Donate It or Demolish It | The Story of Minnesota's Governor's Mansion

Added: 2026-06-01

[00:00:00]Originally built as a private residence,  the Minnesota Governor’s mansion has seen many families come and go. But what did it  originally look like? And how did the original family live in it? Hi everyone, Ken here, hit that  subscribe button and let’s explore This House!

[00:00:14]In 1878, Horace Irvine was born in the  small town of Alma, Wisconsin. His father, Thomas, was running the McDonell and Irvine  Lumber Company at Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin.

[00:00:25]By the time Horace was a teenager, the forests  were thinning, and his father relocated the family's lumber interests to Saint Paul,  Minnesota. In 1899 Thomas founded Thomas Irvine and Sons, and the following year he was one  of the partners who helped Frederick Weyerhaeuser organize the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company itself,  the giant that would eventually buy 900,000 acres of Washington timberland from James J. Hill's  Great Northern Railway. The Irvine name was now stitched into the founding fabric of one of the  largest forest products empires in the world.

[00:00:56]Horace graduated from St. Paul Academy and joined  his father in the business almost immediately.

[00:01:01]He worked his way through every phase of the  trade his father had mastered, including timber holdings, logging operations, manufacturing,  reforestation research, timber byproducts, and the banking side of the industry that allowed  a lumberman to translate forests into liquid capital. In June 1902, when he was just twenty  four years old, Horace was elected a director of the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company, a seat he would  hold continuously for the next forty five years.

[00:01:26]In 1907, he married Clotilde McCullough, who also  came from a socially prominent family. The couple set about building the life that wealthy Saint  Paul families of the early twentieth century were expected to build. They needed a city house  grand enough to entertain in, and they chose the most fashionable spot in St. Paul do so, choosing  to build their dream house along Summit Avenue.

[00:01:47]Summit Avenue in 1910 was already the  most prestigious address in Saint Paul, but the western end of the street, out  near Mississippi River Boulevard, still felt like prairie. It was here, on a generous  one and a half acre lot, that the Irvines paid 7,000 dollars for what was reportedly one of  the last desirable parcels left on the avenue.

[00:02:06]To design the house, the couple  hired William Channing Whitney, a Minneapolis architect who by then was the  favored residential designer for the milling, lumber, and banking elite of the Twin Cities For the Irvines, Whitney chose to interpret an English Tudor country house in a manner softened  by the symmetry that classical training had taught him to favor. The first building permit was  issued in 1910, construction began that year, and the family moved into the completed house  in 1912. The total cost of construction came in around 50,000 dollars. The original footprint  enclosed twenty rooms across roughly 14,700 square feet, expanded to slightly more than  16,000 square feet after a 1922 enlargement.

[00:02:47]There were nine bedrooms, ten bathrooms  in the original layout, nine fireplaces, two sleeping porches, and a service wing wide  enough to house a live in staff of seven.

[00:02:57]The exterior is the surest demonstration of what  Whitney was trying to do. He clad the house in red brick with Bedford limestone trim, then  arranged the main facade with a calm symmetry across its eastern two thirds, anchored by central  double doors fitted with wrought iron grillwork.

[00:03:13]Tudor elements appear in the picturesque  profile of the gables and tall chimneys, in the projecting bays that break up the long  elevation, and in the porte cochere that thrusts out from the western end of the building. The interior is where the lumberman's pride in his trade became most visible. Whitney used  a different species of wood in each major public room, allowing the house to display a kind of  paneled inventory of the forests Horace had spent his life selling. The grand foyer is  paneled in oak, with two interior balconies overlooking the entry, an elegant Tudor revival  staircase curved balusters and newel posts, and decorative ceiling elements that establish  the vocabulary the rest of the rooms will repeat.

[00:03:51]The drawing room is the largest space in the  house, 19 feet by 39 feet, paneled along its walls and folding doors in mahogany. A series of  decorative panels runs along the top of the walls, hand carved with an arch and pilaster motif  that is repeated, in a more elaborate version, above the room's fireplace. The room was used  by the Irvines for large parties and receptions, and all three of their daughters  held their wedding receptions there.

[00:04:17]The dining room is more restrained in scale but  no less considered. Its walls and folding doors are paneled in Circassian walnut, an English  walnut prized for the swirls and curves that develop in its veneer, and its ceiling is  slightly rounded above. The space can seat sixteen comfortably for a formal dinner,  a rather modest number of dinner guests by the standards of a 16,000 square foot house. The library was the room the Irvine family used most. Their daughter, Olivia, later  recalled that her parents loved to read, that the room was always stocked with  the latest books and periodicals.

[00:04:50]Off the south side of the house sits the  solarium, the room that turned out to be the only significant structural change the  Irvines ever made to Whitney's design. In 1922 the family doubled the room's size at a  cost of 7,000 dollars, adding a fireplace and a row of five French doors crowned with  fanlight arches that open onto the terrace.

[00:05:10]The walls are built of white ashlar stone cut in  precise rectangular blocks with a smooth finish, and the ceiling is paneled and beamed. Connected by an underground utility tunnel to the main house, a 3 story  carriage house of about 3,400 square feet completes the architectural program. Whitney also designed a formal garden scheme for the grounds, complete with a rose  garden, pergola, gazebo, statuary, seats, sundial, and beds of annuals and perennials.  The Irvines declined to install the full plan but borrowed from its ideas, laying out a formal  garden in the center of the yard with an arbor and a small sunken reflecting pool at the back of  the property and a concrete column pergola along the rear edge. There was a sundial, a vegetable  patch for a brief stretch, and a flat lawn well suited to the croquet games that the Irvine  children played throughout the warmer months.

[00:05:59]By the time the Irvines threw their first  dance there, the house had everything a Saint Paul family of their station required and  several things that were genuinely innovative.

[00:06:08]It had been wired for both electricity and gas.  It had a built in central vacuum system. It had a passenger elevator, modern plumbing, and  a staff capable of running a party of any size the family cared to entertain. In 1947, Horace passed away, and The estate he left behind was valued at 3,937,000  dollars, a figure that placed him among the wealthiest men in the upper Midwest at the time. Clotilde stayed at the house after Horace's death, presiding over the home until her own passing in  1964. And with her passing the question of what to do with the Summit Avenue house became  a family decision. The estate stipulated that the home had to be given away. If no use  could be found for it, the property had to be destroyed. The two youngest Irvine daughters,  Coco and Olivia had an idea of what they could do with the house to honor their parents wishes. The state of Minnesota, at that moment, was one of the only states in the union without an official  governor's residence. Minnesota's governors had always lived in their own homes or in temporary  lodgings in the capital city and had received visiting dignitaries in hotel ballrooms or in the  reception room at the Minnesota State Capitol.

[00:07:16]Coco and Olivia decided to fix that. On August  1st, 1965, the two sisters formally donated the house to the state of Minnesota in memory of their  parents. The deed of gift was finalized later that month. In 1980 the legislature established  the Governor's Residence Council, which still oversees renovation and maintenance, and in 1982  First Lady Gretchen Quie founded the 1006 Summit Avenue Society, a nonprofit volunteer organization  to help fund furnishings and interior improvements that would otherwise have been politically  difficult to pay for with public money.

[00:07:52]Thankfully, due to these efforts, the  governor’s mansion remains meticulously maintained and preserved for future generations. And with that I’ll turn it over to you. What did you think about this mansion? Let me know down  below in the comments section. I’d also like to say a special thank you to our members for making  this video possible. If you would like to support our research and the production of these videos,  join our membership program today. As always, thank you all for watching and I’ll  see you next time on This House.