The Winslow House Hotel in the 1860s. (Hennepin County Library)
James Madison Winslow was 42 years old when he arrived in Minnesota Territory in 1852. Like many a New Englander (Winslow was from Vermont), he was a land speculator and serial entrepreneur, full of ambition and dreams of making his fortune.
And make his fortune he did. Numerous newspaper articles from the time show him buying and selling real estate in the St. Paul area — so much so that there are a street and a property addition named after him.
In his 1886 book, “Pen Pictures of St. Paul, Minnesota,” T. W. Newson described Winslow as “a tall, slender man, with thin features and measured his words as a clerk measures molasses in cold weather; and yet he was a good deal of a man, for he had brains to originate and courage to carry out.”
Winslow didn’t just buy and sell land. Shortly after his arrival, he built a flour mill along Trout Brook, near present-day Dale Street and Larpenteur Avenue.
Then he began building hotels. The first was in St. Paul, the second in St. Peter, both named the Winslow House. In 1856, he started construction of a third hotel, also named the Winslow House, in the town of St. Anthony, overlooking St. Anthony Falls.
It was a dignified, four-story structure, built in the colonial revival style of limestone quarried from Nicollet Island. Its roof was topped by a cupola which, at one time, sported a weathervane depicting the Angel Gabriel. A set of pyramidal stairs led to the main entrance, covered by a white portico. Balconies projected from all three of the upper floors, allowing guests to step outside for a breath of fresh air.
The interior was furnished luxuriously, with black walnut and mahogany furniture and Brussels carpets on the floors. One guest recalled in a letter to the St. Cloud Democrat, “cosy (sic) chambers, pleasant dressing rooms and long halls, all finished and furnished in a style of luxury which is seldom equaled in first class Eastern hotels. In fact, we have never, in any place, seen a house where French luxury and sprightliness were so combined with English solidity and comfort.”
“If you could look back,” Frank B. O’Brien wrote, “to the summer of 1859 you would see … as fine a hotel as there was in the West, and furnished throughout with the best that could be procured, regardless of expense. Here were office, parlors, ball room, dining room, bar and billiard room, bridal chambers, and hundreds of sleeping rooms, in fact everything that could be found in first class hotels, East or South.”
Winslow leased the hotel to M. V. and D. J. Mattison on a long-term basis. In 1858 he sold the building and its contents to C. W. McLean, a Boston capitalist, for $160,000.
The hotel was an immediate hit with Southern planters, who came to Minnesota to escape summer’s heat. They were, O’Brien said, “crowded from cellar to attic.” They brought their slaves with them, even though Minnesota was a free territory. They also brought their own musicians to provide entertainment.
“The primitive scenery about the falls was surpassingly lovely; hence the reason for the liberal hotel patronage,” O’Brien continued in his 1904 book, “Minnesota Pioneer Sketches; from the personal recollections and observations of a pioneer resident.”
“Nicollet Island had not as yet been desecrated, but was in its pure, virgin state; Hennepin Island was fairly well utilized for manufacturing purposes, although its banks to a great extent unmolested, were a mass of wild flowers, grapes and raspberries.”
According to a Dec. 1878 article in The Minneapolis Journal, “In the season of 1858 there were more than 150 boarders from the south, and in 1859 and 1860 there were at times nearly three hundred guests at the place.”
The Winslow House provided unmatched lodgings and service for three years. Then, the start of the Civil War in April 1861 effectively shut down tourism at St. Anthony Falls.
Sale and decline
“During the first year of the war, the hotel was used as a water-cure establishment for ‘bran-eaters,’ as they were familiarly called. This was conducted by Dr. R. T. Thrall. These bloomer freaks were a decided contrast to the Southern occupants of a year previous,” O’Brien recalled.
Business at the Winslow House declined steeply, and its owners soon declared bankruptcy. The elegant furniture was sold to the International Hotel in St. Paul. There were attempts to keep the hotel alive, and it functioned as an apartment building for a while.
The building continued to be a community gathering place, with dances in the ballroom. Local church groups staged fundraisers there, and the Old Settlers Association held reunions at the Winslow House. Its cupola was a popular observation spot; hotel owners charged 15 cents to those who wanted to climb to the top and look at St. Anthony’s upstart neighbor, Minneapolis.
In 1872, a group of 15 Ojibwe traveled from Leech Lake to St. Anthony and camped along Second Street. During their stay, they performed “a fine selection of about a dozen” dances in the Winslow dining room.
Numerous ideas were floated for re-using the building. A proposal in the Feb. 14, 1871 Minneapolis Daily Tribune suggested adding glass to all the balconies and creating an indoor vineyard. The attic, a “useless garret,” could have been filled with “great tubs of oranges, figs and other tropical fruits and flowers.”
In 1873, the East Division of the Minneapolis Fire Department tested a new steam fire engine. “The third test was the most satisfactory,” reported the Tribune. “Taking suction at the river, water was forced through eight hundred feet of hose up a rise of seventy-five feet to the Winslow House, and an inch stream thrown above ‘Angel Gabe’ – the weather vane – one hundred and forty feet high, the gauge showing the steam pressure to be eighty pounds.”
An advertisement for the Winslow House. (Hennepin County Library)
A ghost story
As the Winslow House slowly fell into disrepair, it became the haunt of a ghost, proprietor and water-cure proponent Dr. Jewel, who died there in January 1868. His “shade” was first seen by the 14-year-old daughter of a tenant, Prof. F.E. McBain. According to McBain, she was passing through the ground-floor laundry room when she was greeted by “a tall, slim man, dressed in a fine suit of broadcloth, with a white night-cap on his head, and a pair of white stockings on his feet.”
Mrs. Jewel was a believer in spiritualism and often held seances at the Winslow, where the doctor reportedly communicated that he had met the girl and “was often in and about the building.”
McBain and his next-door neighbor decided to investigate. They also provided the girl with a pistol and instructed her to shoot the intruder. When she entered the laundry room to get a broom, “just inside of the door stood the man, looking directly at her … She immediately drew the pistol, presented it at him; but he seemed indifferent to the weapon, and at the distance of six feet she fired at him. He at once bent forward; clasping his hands across his breast, exclaiming ‘Oh! my God!’ and disappeared into the cellar,” McBain reported in the March 24, 1868 Minneapolis Tribune. McBain and his neighbor investigated the cellar and found the bullet lodged in the wall.
McBain and his ghost story were often the butt of jokes in later years as the Winslow House again went up for sale.
Start of Macalester College
The building was acquired by Charles Macalester of Philadelphia. It functioned briefly as the Baldwin School, then a prep school called Jesus College, run by Rev. Edward D. Neil. When Macalester died in 1874, he willed the Winslow House to a board of trustees, with the provision that the trustees raise $25,000 — approximately $700,000 in today’s money — and start a college named after him. In 1879, the trustees put the building up for sale at one-third of its original cost and the college moved to St. Paul.
From then until 1886, it served as the Minnesota College Hospital. Shortly after, the Winslow House was razed to make way for the Minneapolis Industrial Exposition Building.
James Winslow, always ready to take on a new project, established the first telegraph line from St. Paul to Red Wing, then moved to San Francisco, where he died in 1885.