Living Our Dream

Duluth, MN Part V: Glensheen Mansion

Superior, MN - Events of Thursday, July 7, 2011

After we left Enger Tower, we drove a few miles along the north shore of Lake Superior to Glensheen Mansion. Glensheen is a 38-room, Jacobean-style mansion built from 1905 to 1908 by Chester A. Congdon and his wife, Clara. Chester A. Congdon was a lawyer who came to Duluth in 1892 and became a partner in a law firm. He later became became general council for US Steel, but where he really made his money was as an investor in iron and copper mining.

The tours of the mansion are guided, and we had about half an hour to kill before our tour so we looked around the gardens. The plot in the photo below had an interesting pattern created by planting different kinds of leaf lettuce.

In addition to lettuce and other vegetables, the garden had quite a few flowers.

Flowers in the composite photo below are peonies (top and bottom left), iris (center), peony (top right), and petunia (bottom right).

Tours start inside the carriage house. The carriage house is so big, at first we thought it was the main house.

The Congdons kept several cows, and we walked past the milking stalls on our way into the carriage house.

Then we passed through the stables where the horses were kept. Automobiles were available, but weren't that prevalent yet in the early 1900s, so the Congdons used carriages in the early years at their new house. In fact, they bought several new carriages about the same time they built their mansion.

Within a few minutes of our getting to the carriage house, our tour was called. From the carriage house, the tour heads up the walk toward the main house. Along the way, we started to appreciate the beauty of the site the Congdons selected to build their house. In addition to the gardens, there are woods, beautiful lake views and well-manicured lawns.

The name of the estate, Glensheen, comes from the fact the mansion is located in a wooded glen. The origin of the "sheen" part of the name is a little less clear, but Mrs. Congdon referred to the sheen from the lake in her journal, so that is one possible meaning.

Unfortunately, photography isn't permitted inside the house, so all we can show you is the exterior.

The inside of the house is finished with carved paneling, marble fireplaces and custom-built furnishings. Approximately 95% of the furnishings and accessories in the house are original. The home has 27,000 square feet of living space. Gleensheen was state of the art for the time it was built, and it has hot water, electricity (like the James J. Hill mansion we saw in St. Paul, the light fixtures had both electricity and gas), and central heat.

The Congdons had 7 children, one of whom died in infancy. Most of their children were in their mid to late teens by the time the Congdons moved to Glensheen. After Chester died in 1916, his wife and Elisabeth, who was the Congdon's youngest child and who was unmarried, continued to live at Glensheen. Chester's wife died in 1955. Elisabeth, who was the last of the Congdon children, donated the estate to the University of Minnesota in 1969. Elisabeth was allowed to remain in the home until her death in 1977. The fact that the house remained in the family is the reason so much of the furnishings and accessories are still there.

The university opened the home to the public in 1979. The university also uses the estate for educational purposes and rents it out for special events such as weddings, corporate meetings and private parties.

After the tour, we stopped for a photo on the terrace behind the house.

The terrace overlooks the formal gardens.

From the formal garden, we walked down to the lake. Glensheen got its water from Tischer Creek, which runs down the western side of the property. The photo below shows where the creek meets the lake.

We followed a path a short distance up Tischer Creek to where a stone bridge crossed the creek.

The path at the other side of the stone bridge was quite narrow and we decided we didn't need an encounter with poison ivy, so we headed back to the beach. Also along the lake shore is the boat house and the remnants of the pier, which was the largest private pier on the lake at the time it was built.

By the time we climbed Enger Tower and toured Glensheen, we were starved, so the 2011 Zeller Foodie Tour stopped at the Anchor Bar and Grill in Superior, MN on our way back to the motor home.

The Anchor Bar, which was featured on Triple D, specializes in burgers. In fact, that's just about all they serve. They use ground beef that they buy fresh every day. On a typical day, they will go through 120 to 150 pounds.

There are over 20 different types of burgers on the menu that start at $2.75 for plain. Also on the menu are things like a Reuben burger with sauerkraut and Swiss, the olive burger with cream cheese-olive spread, and the cashew burger with cashews and Swiss. The most expensive item on the menu is the galley buster, which is a one-pound triple burger with three slices of cheese for $5.75.

Margery had a blue cheese burger, Paul had a regular cheeseburger, and we split an order of fries. The burgers were both delish - nice and juicy without being too greasy. The bar was pretty busy for 2:30 in the afternoon, and we had to wait about 45 minutes to get our food. Paul figures they probably take their time with the food because most people will just order another round of drinks while they're waiting. With such a low price for their burgers, they probably make most of their money on drinks. By the time the food came, we were so hungry we forgot to take a picture. Oh well, they pretty much looked like regular hamburgers anyway.

We had a couple more things we wanted to see while staying in Superior. Stay tuned.

Duluth, MN Part IV: Enger Tower

Superior, MN - Events of Thursday, July 7, 2011

Enger Tower, which stands on the hill above Duluth, was one of the landmarks pointed out on our Vista Fleet harbor cruise. The 5-story tower was built in 1939 from local bluestone in honor of Bert Enger. After getting a closeup view of Twin Ports on our harbor cruise the day before, we decided to drive up to see Enger Tower the next day to get a panoramic view of the whole area.

Bert Enger was an immigrant from Norway who came to America in the 1870s and made his fortune in the furniture industry. Upon his death in 1931, he left 2/3 of his estate to the city of Duluth.

Enger Tower just underwent 3 months of restoration this spring. They got rid of old graffiti, re-pointed the mortar joints between the stonework, patched plaster, repaired the roof and repaired and replaced lighting. The place looks great.

In the area on the hillside between the parking lot and the tower are gardens. It looked like they have been renovated, too.

We climbed the tower and were treated to a gorgeous, panoramic view of Lake Superior (left), the ports of Duluth and Superior, and the St. Louis River (right).

Paul snapped a lot of photos from tower and from the top of the hill.

Below are a few of them. The next one shows the north shore of Lake Superior...

...a little closer view of the Duluth Lift Bridge...

...grain elevators...

...and the coal terminal where we saw the SS Arthur M. Anderson unloading limestone the day before when we were on the Vista Fleet harbor cruise. You can see the big piles of limestone being stored in front of the terminal.

Speaking of our harbor cruise, we could also see the Vista Star starting the morning cruise.

We took in the view for a while, then headed back down the tower. On the way from the tower to the car, we took a little time to enjoy some other parts of the garden we missed on the way up. There is a Japanese-style garden with a dry stream bed of pebbles tumbling down the hillside.

We had to stop to ring the bell.

There were numerous shady benches where you could pause and enjoy the gardens.

The next photo shows a couple of different peonies that were blooming (left and right) and a mottled blue bearded iris (center).

From Enger Tower, we headed a few miles up the north shore of Lake Superior. We'll tell you all about where we went in our next post.

Duluth, MN Part I: Twin Ports Harbor Cruise

Superior, WI - Events of Tuesday, July 5 - Wednesday, July 6, 2011

It was about a 3-hour drive from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Duluth, MN. We stayed just across the St. Louis River from Duluth in Superior, WI. The St. Louis River forms the boundary between Minnesota and the northwestern tip of Wisconsin.

We stayed at Nemadji Mobile Home Park and Campground. Normally, we avoid mobile home parks, but this one got pretty decent reviews on rvparkreviews.com, and it had a fairly convenient location for what we thought we wanted to see and do in the area.

When Paul first heard the name of the campground, he thought Margery was talking about a Robbin Williams movie, but that was Jumanji. The campground gets its name from the Nemadji River which is nearby. The name of the river comes from the Native American name meaning "left-hand river." When viewed from the bay at the end of Lake Superior, the Nemadji River is to the left of the St. Louis River.

Nemadji is primarily a mobile home park that has a dozen or so tent/tent trailer sites and about a dozen or so full-hookup RV sites. The roads are paved, and the sites are gravel. All the sites are back-ins. The RV sites have full-hookups - some have 30-amp electric, and some have 30/50 amps.

This is an older park, so some of the RV sites are a little small. Most of the mobile homes are older, too, but they are all well-kept. The mobile homes are generally away from the RV sites, but a few are mixed in. The photo below shows our RV site at Nemadji Mobile Home Park.

The next shot shows the view down the road with RV sites on the left and a few of the mobile homes that are mixed in with RVs on the right.

The owner is super friendly and helpful. Even though she walks with a cane, she came all the way over to our site after we got set up to give us a map of the area and to tell us where the visitor center was. She apologized because she was out of the tourist magazine she likes to give out and said they would have some later. Sure enough, she came back about an hour later and personally delivered a copy of the magazine to us.

Duluth, MN and Superior, WI lie across the St. Louis River from one another at the western end of Lake Superior, and together they are known as Twin Ports. There is a long spit of land at the end of Lake Superior that forms a natural harbor. The completion of locks and canals at Sault St. Marie in the 1850s and the discovery of large deposits of iron ore in the Mesabi Range 70 miles northwest of Duluth and Superior in the 1860s transformed Twin Ports into the largest combined port on the Great Lakes. We were interested in learning about the port and seeing how the big ore boats are loaded, so our first sightseeing outing was to take a cruise of the Duluth-Superior Harbor.

Vista Fleet cruises have several types of daily cruises - a regular sightseeing cruise, a pizza cruise, a family cruise and a sunset dinner cruise. We opted for the regular 2-hour sightseeing cruise aboard the Vista Star.

The cruise starts out by sailing under the Duluth Lift Bridge and out into Lake Superior.

The bridge crosses a canal that was dug through the narrow spit of land that protects Twin Ports harbor. The natural entrance to the harbor, which is also the mouth of the St. Louis River, lies at the other end of the spit about 7 miles to the southeast in Superior, WI.

The canal has an interesting story. In 1870, Duluth wanted to dig the canal to create their own entrance to the harbor, but the move was vehemently opposed by Superior, WI because they were afraid the canal would give a shipping advantage to Duluth. They also feared the canal would cause a change in currents that would clog their entrance with sediment.

Superior fought the canal in Federal Court and won. While an injunction to stop the canal sat on somebody's desk over the weekend, about 50 volunteers went out and quickly dug the canal before the injunction could be served on Monday. Fortunately for Superior, the canal actually helped them because many of their docks were closer to the canal than to their own harbor entrance, and the currents changed in such a manner so as to actually deepen their entrance. For once, the unintended consequences were positive!

As we passed through the canal, we got a good look at the beach on the lake side of the spit and at one of the three harbor lights. The light in the photo below is white...

...the light on the south side of the harbor entrance is green...

...and the light on the north side is red.

We sailed out into Lake Superior where we could get a good view of Duluth. Duluth extends for about 9 or 10 miles along the north shore of the lake.

Lake Superior is the largest, deepest, coldest, and cleanest of the Great Lakes. It has a surface area of 31,820 square miles, an average depth of 482 feet, and it is 1,332 feet deep at the deepest point. The volume of water in Lake Superior could fill all the other Great Lakes, with enough left over to fill Lake Erie three more times. The average water temperature is 40º in summer, although shallow water near shore can get somewhat warmer. The lake freezes over in winter, and the shipping season runs from about March through December.

The Ojibwe Indians called the lake Gitchigami, which means "big water." Henry Wadsworth Longfellow used the name Gitche Gumee in his poem "The Song of Hiawatha," as did Gordon Lightfoot in his song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

After making a big loop in Lake Superior, we headed back under the lift bridge and started along the Duluth docks. One of the things we noticed on our way into Duluth-Superior was the many grain elevators along the waterfront - they are easily seen because they are so tall. Midwest grain is shipped here by rail, then it is shipped to various locations around the great lakes and out through the St. Lawrence Seaway to Europe and South America.

Some cargo arrives by boat and is shipped out by rail. Other cargo comes in by rail and goes out by boat. It depends on what the cargo is, where it's coming from, and where it's going.

We also passed a fuel depot where the freighters can take on fuel. Although large freighters can consume massive amounts of fuel, they can also carry a huge amount of cargo. Ships can move almost twice as much cargo on a gallon of fuel as a train, and almost 4 times as much as a truck.

Great Lakes freighters carry bulk cargo such as grain, iron ore, coal and salt. The silos in the next photo hold cement.

The white cylinders in the photo below are the top sections of towers for wind turbines. They are being shipped out by rail. We saw long turbine blades on another dock nearby.

As we sailed up the St. Louis River amidst the commercial loading docks, storage silos and terminals, we passed an island that is a rookery for gulls and terns. The man-made island was built to support a bridge that once crossed the river at that point. The dark objects in the water are the remnants of the old, wood pilings.

A little farther up the river, we came to the SS Arthur M. Anderson docked at a terminal that is designed to load coal. Rail cars are backed up a mile-long ramp to the top of the terminal where they dump their coal into huge bins. There are some chutes that load boats by gravity while the chutes in the photo below (shown in the vertical storage position) use conveyors for faster loading and better distribution of product in the cargo hold.

The colors on the Anderson's bow signifies the three materials she normally carries - red for iron ore, black for coal, and gray for limestone. Although the terminal is designed to load coal, the Anderson was unloading limestone using the conveyor that is permanently mounted to her deck (the white, bridge-like structure on the left). The limestone is being dumped into another conveyor that runs under the coal bins to an immense pile in a field beside the coal terminal.

The Arthur M. Anderson was built in 1952. Ships last much longer on the Great Lakes because fresh water is much less corrosive than salt water. She was the last ship to be in contact with the Edmund Fitzgerald before the Fitzgerald sank in a storm on November 10, 1975. The Fitzgerald was the last major ship to go down in the Great Lakes. She left Superior, WI the day before bound for Detroit with a load of iron ore pellets. None of the 29 crew members on board survived. The sinking was immortalized by the Gordon Lightfoot song "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."

On our way back to the dock, we passed another coal terminal on the Superior side of the river. This one works a little differently with one, larger loading arm. Low-sulfur coal from Wyoming and Montana is in particularly high demand.

It was a very interesting cruise. It was fun seeing all the gigantic equipment and learning what it was for and how it works. After our cruise, we made another stop to learn more about the freighters themselves. We'll tell you all about it in our next post.

Minneapolis - St. Paul, MN Part II: James J. Hill House

Woodbury, MN - Events of Thursday, June 30, 2011

Our next day of sightseeing was a busy one. We had three things we wanted to do in downtown St. Paul, and we were originally going to take a couple of days to relax before heading into the city. That would have made it a Saturday, which we thought would mean less traffic and easier parking.

However, like so many states, Minnesota is undergoing a budget crisis and was facing a state government shutdown on Friday, July 1. Therefore, since the three things we wanted to do in downtown St. Paul were scheduled to be shut down by the budget impasse, we decided to squeeze in all three things in the city on Thursday before the shutdown.

Our first stop was the James J. Hill House. James J. Hill was a railroad magnate who built a red sandstone mansion on fashionable Summit Avenue. The mansion was completed in 1891.

The James J. Hill house is operated by the Minnesota Historical Society which gets more than half its funding from the state. Their funding was scheduled to be cut off when the state shut down on July 1, so they were being forced to shut down along with state facilities.

Reservations for tours are suggested, so we called the day before and scheduled a tour for 10:30 AM. Tours are given on the hour and on the half hour. We arrived a little early and found plenty of free, on-street parking. We had a some time to kill before our tour, so we walked down to the corner to see the Cathedral of St. Paul.

This is the fourth building in St. Paul, MN to bear the name Cathedral of St. Paul. The first was a small log chapel built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River in 1841. The chapel was later officially designated a cathedral. A second cathedral was built in downtown St. Paul in 1851, and a third cathedral was completed in 1858. Construction of the existing cathedral was begun in 1906, and the first mass was celebrated in 1915. Work on interior projects continued over the ensuing years until the final stained glass windows were installed in 1941.

The structure is truly immense and very impressive.

We have no idea how many people the cathedral seats, but it is easily the largest sanctuary we have ever seen.

The next photo is a closer view of the chancel.

After spending 10 or 15 minutes at the cathedral, we headed back up the street to the James J. Hill House.

James Hill, who was born in Canada, moved permanently to St. Paul in the 1850s. He worked in the wholesale grocery business where he learned about freight and transportation. He eventually started working for himself, and in the 1860s and 1870s, he was very successful in the steamboat and coal businesses. He also became a member of the board of directors at several major banks. Hill began buying up bankrupt businesses, building them up again, and selling them for a profit.

After the Panic of 1873, Hill and several partners bought a railroad and were able to not only rescue it, but they were able to greatly expand it. In order to prevent government crackdown because of excessive profits, Hill poured a lot of the profits back into the railroad. Not only did Hill expand the railroad, he sold land along the route to developers and helped bring in business and industry. James Hill became known as the "Empire Builder." By 1892, Hill's Great Northern Railway reached all the way to Seattle, WA.

James Hill married his wife Mary in 1867. They had 10 children, one of whom died in infancy. In 1882, the Hills bought two lots on Summit Avenue, which has a commanding view of downtown St. Paul and the Mississippi River. They razed the two houses on the lots they bought, and began construction of their own mansion.

The house is designed in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. Henry Hobson Richardson was a well-known American architect of the 1800s who created a design style that is typified by heavy cut-stone blocks, arches and turrets. Richardson designed, among other things, the Allegheny County Courthouse in our old hometown of Pittsburgh.

Our tour started in the music room. Like many grand homes built in the Victorian period, many of the rooms were decorated with different themes. The music room is decorated in the style of Louis XIV, which is characterized by intricate decoration that is typically painted white of cream-color like the fireplace in the photo below.

The next photo shows the fine carving of another fireplace. The fireplaces in the photo above and below are hand-carved, painted mahogany.

James Hill built his house about the time electric lighting was being introduced. Because electric lighting was so new, it wasn't always reliable. In fact, since it was mostly businesses that were using electricity in the beginning, and since most businesses were closed on Sunday, the generators would be shut down for maintenance. The lighting fixtures in the Hill House are set up to run on gas and electricity. The two candles in the sconce without light bulbs are piped for gas.

The grand staircase is shown in the photo below. The wood is hand-carved, quarter-sawn oak.

The Hill House is very sparsely furnished. James Hill died in 1916, and Mary died in 1921. Four of the daughters purchased the house from the estate and donated it the Archdiocese of St. Paul who used the house for offices, residences and classrooms for a teacher's college. The Archdiocese had no need for the furniture, so it was sold. Only a few original pieces have been returned to the house.

The church used the house for 53 years. Fortunately, they only did some minor remodeling and made no major or irreversible changes. After building new, spacious offices next door, the archdiocese sold the house to the Minnesota Historical Society in 1978.

Since there isn't much furniture, most of our photos were of fireplaces and woodwork. Big, empty rooms just aren't that interesting. Speaking of fireplaces, the one in the formal dining room was especially beautiful. The fireplace and diningroom chairs were carved with the same intricate design. They were all carved out of mahogany.

The Celtic-style carving is very finely done.

The tour goes to the second floor where James', Mary's, and the girls' bedrooms were, and to the third floor where the boys' bedrooms and the servants' quarters were located. There isn't much to see there because, as we said, there isn't much furniture in the house in the first place, and most of the fancy woodwork and fireplaces are on the first floor where they would have been seen by guests.

The tour also goes to the basement. This was where the kitchen and other work areas of the house were located. The photo below shows part of the laundry room. Laundry would have been done by hand. Notice the washboard and the hand wringer near the center. The tub on the left was for soaking, next was washing, the third was for rinsing, and the last was for bluing. Many people today may not know what bluing is. It is a blue dye (usually ultramarine or Prussian blue) that is added to the final rinse, especially for whites, to help counteract greying or yellowing of the fabric.

The furnace room is also in the basement. During the winter, a workman called the stoker would have to hand shovel tons of coal into the burners. The strength and stamina the stoker built up from shoveling all that coal earned him another job - he also got to pump the huge bellows for the organ located upstairs in the library.

We finished up our tour of the James Hill House a little after noon. We still had two more things we wanted to do in downtown St. Paul, so stay tuned.

Minneapolis - St. Paul, MN Part I: Minnesota Landscape Arboretum

Woodbury, MN - Events of Wednesday, June 28 - Thursday, June 29, 2011

From Miltona, MN we headed southeast to Minneapolis - St. Paul. Although the downtown areas of Minneapolis and St. Paul, also known as the Twin Cities, are about 10 miles apart, the cities run together in the middle. Minneapolis lies to the west and St. Paul lies to the east. Since most of what we wanted to see was on the St. Paul side of the Twin Cities, we chose a campground about 10 miles to the east of St. Paul. We stayed at St. Paul East RV Park in Woodbury, MN.

About half the sites at St. Paul East RV Park have full hookups, and the other half are water and electric only. Some sites have 30-amp electric, and some have 30/50 amps. There is also a mixture of pull-throughs and back-ins. Free Wi-fi is available, but only at the office. The sites are a little narrow, but are still acceptable. The roads and pads are gravel/dirt, and most sites have a little grass between them.

The photo below is a view down our row. As you can see, tow vehicles and towed vehicles have to park sideways because the sites are not only narrow, but also short.

There is a quarry across the road from the campground, and you can hear the motors of the equipment humming and the backup beepers beeping during the day. There is also a little noise from I-94 that's not too far away.

The weather forecast for the day after we arrived was calling for sunshine, so we decided to take advantage of that fact and visit the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. The arboretum is located southwest of Minneapolis and was the farthest thing from the campground we were planning to see.

The Minnesota Landscape Arboretum is part of the Department of Horticulture Science of the University of Minnesota. It is open to the public every day except Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Tha arboretum consists of 1,000 acres of gardens, model landscapes, and natural areas that consist of woodlands, prairies, and wetlands. They also have an extensive collection of trees and shrubs.

Outside the visitor center, we were greeted by a familiar type of stick sculpture by Patrick Dougherty.

We first saw Dougherty's work at the gardens at the sundial in Redding, CA. He has done over 200 such massive installations around the world. Click here to read about the gardens and to see the stick sculpture we saw in Redding.

In the neighborhood of the visitor center, there are about a dozen gardens that are interconnected by a series of criss-crossing paths. We started out in the direction of the homeowner demonstration gardens. Along the way, we enjoyed the colorful annuals...

...and a fountain surrounded by potted bog plants.

The homeowner demonstration garden had lots of ideas for home gardens like the one below that would be suitable for a patio or terrace.

There were also ideas for planting herbs and vegetables in small spaces.

In the homeowner garden, Paul took a picture of Margery taking a picture.

Then a little later, Margery took a picture of Paul taking a picture.

Across the main path from the homeowner gardens was the rose garden where the hybrid tea roses were in full bloom.

In addition to the stick sculpture by Patrick Dougherty at the entrance, the arboretum had a special show of sculptures by Steve Tobin called Steelroots. There were about half a dozen smaller sculptures, and about a dozen up to 40 feet high representing tree roots. Most were graceful like the one in the photo below...

...and a few were gnarled and realistic-looking.

The Steelroots scuplture in the photo below was on pavement and shows an interesting, ever-changing pattern of light and shadow.

The hosta garden provided some welcome shade.

We continued our way through the gardens, then stopped for another photo at the knot garden.

The composite photo below shows just some of the beautiful flowers we saw.

Top row (L to R): dahlia, peony, sunflower

Middle row: water lily, Asiatic lily, Asiatic lily

Bottom row: Shrub rose, hybrid tea rose, newly-formed grapes

After we walked around the gardens, we hopped in the car and headed out to Three Mile Drive. Three Mile Drive makes a loop through some of the woodland and prairie areas. You can also walk or bicycle around Three Mile Drive, but we had already done enough walking for the day. Besides, it was getting warm, it was getting late, and we were getting hungry.

Three Mile Drive also has areas with various types of trees and shrubs planted in groups. Numerous small parking areas are provided so you can stop to take a closer look. If you are planning some landscaping, and you want to know what a certain type of tree looks like and how big it gets, this is an excellent place to come. There are  separate areas for weeping trees, spruce, maples, oaks, pines, nut trees - you name it, they probably have it. There is also a couple of areas for different kinds of shrubs.

Since we aren't planning to do landscaping in the near future, we didn't stop for any tree photos, but we did stop along Three Mile Drive at the shrub rose garden for a quick look and a photo.

As we said, we were getting hungry. As luck would have it there was a Qdoba on our way back to the motor home. Even though we had recently eaten at Qdoba, we couldn't resist stopping again since, for the most part, they are few and far between on our travel route.

After another delicious meal, we made our way back to the motor home to relax and to plan our sightseeing for the next day. Stay tuned.