In 1868, following his father’s death, fifteen-year-old Chester Congdon went to work in a lumber yard. He told his mother that someday he wanted “to be better off than everybody else.” Thanks to his skills as an attorney, wise investments, and shrewd business strategies that found him entangled with John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan, by 1902 Congdon had become one of the wealthiest men in Minnesota. In 1905, Chester and his wife, Clara, began building a grand home on the north shore of Lake Superior in Duluth, Minnesota: Glensheen, a self-sustaining estate that survives today as a symbol of Congdon’s success and Duluth’s gilded age, when its East End mansions housed the families of grain trade commissioners, lumber barons, mining magnates—and their attorneys.
Over 200 modern and historic photographs guide you along a detailed room-by-room tour of the Minnesota’s most famous mansion and stroll through the estate grounds as you learn the story of the Congdon family and how Chester created the fortune that financed their grand home on Lake Superior’s North Shore. Five percent of the publisher’s sales of this book directly support Glensheen Historic Estate.
