Minnesota Open House: A Guide to Historic House Museums

Duluth’s majestic Glensheen Mansion, featuring thirty-nine ornate rooms and expansive landscaped grounds. Minneapolis’s stunning Purcell-Cutts House, a showplace of finely crafted woodwork of Prairie School design. Stevens County’s Trantow Log Cabin, built in the German style with dovetailed log corners. Minnesota has a remarkable array of house museums, each with its own unique history and architectural significance. Minnesota Open House features nearly two hundred of these grand mansions, humble homes, log cabins, frontier forts, and pioneer villages that are open to the public.

 

Organized by region and featuring easy-to-follow maps, this handy guide to historically significant and often breathtaking sites is the perfect road-trip companion. Engaging site histories tell of immigrant struggles and baronial opulence, of political ambition and architectural innovation. Entries detail each site’s cultural and political import, and photographs illustrate key features, from leaded-glass windows to widow’s walks. Easy-to-follow practical information makes arranging a visit easy.

 

Whether planning family time on a Sunday afternoon or plotting your next vacation, Minnesota Open House is your key to the grandiose and the humble, to meticulously crafted and hauntingly rustic dwellings across the state.    

 

Krista Finstad Hanson is a freelance writer and the author of Wisconsin’s Historic Houses and Living History Museums: A Visitor’s Guide.