Feb 26, 1998
Anne C. Semple and Frank B. House
The Anne C. and Frank B. Semple House exemplifies the business success of one ofMinnesota’s most prosperous tum-of-the-century hardware merchants. The imposing exterior and richly detailed interior are symbols of the accomplishments of a man who was one ofthe creators of what one historian called “now and for years the largest hardware house in the northwest.” The grand and showy palace advertised the success of Frank Semple, a prominent Minneapolis businessman. Mr. Semple’s firm, Janney Semple and Company, was started on the Mississippi riverfront in 1866 and continued to exist, under slightly different names, until it was acquired by a national retailer in 1960. The house meets National Register Criterion C in the area of Architecture as an impressive and elaborate example of the Second Renaissance Revival style. The House: A Symbol of Success The Anne C. and Frank B. Semple House is one of a decreasing number of large houses in what was once a neighborhood of late nineteenth century brick and stone houses. The house is a symbol of the prosperity of Frank Semple, the hardware merchant, and his firm, Janney Semple and Company. The palatial residence was designed by Minneapolis architects who were known for their immense, attention-getting houses and their imposing public buildings. The Semple house is a representation of the Second Renaissance Revival style of architecture. Architecture critic Larry Millett has written about the popularity of this classic style and wryly remarked that it “was. . .popular for residences, perhaps because the style was associated with great wealth and good taste, two attributes that do not always coincide.” Renaissance Revival buildings are generally straight-fronted structures without any considerable projections or recessions in the main mass. They have symmetrical elevations crowned with bold cornices. Apart from rusticated quoins and a rusticated ground floor, the wall surfaces are usually smooth and plain, serving as a neutral background for windows, doorways and balustraded balconies. Stone and marble are the facing materials. The Revival opened with the Villard Houses in New York, whose design came from the office of McKim, Mead & White in 1883. “The Villard Houses were modeled after the late fourteenth-century Cancellara Palace in Rome. The houses adopted its rusticated ground story and its four types of windows. They omitted the two pilaster orders of Cancellara, thus making the facades simpler and flatter—and reversing the whole tendency of Italianate design. One of the most famous buildings of the Second Renaissance Revival is the Boston Public Library, built to the designs of McKim, Mead and White in 1888- 1892. “ Late nineteenth-century revivals, which are the Second Renaissance Revival styles, are larger, grander and more elaborate than earlier nineteenth-century style revivals. They tend to be stately rather than exciting, “correct” rather than daring. Characteristic of the Renaissance are arched openings, rusticated masonry laid with deep joints to give the appearance of massiveness, and strong horizontal lines. Cornices are finely detailed and moldings are crisply drawn. A critic of American design, Spiro Kostof, writes about the Renaissance style as it manifested itself at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘The houses now no longer depended for their effect on fancy landscaping and a large lot, but rather tended toward a public presence by favoring a large shape on a relatively small lot.... The styles strained for a public, imposing look.... Something else was different too. The difference between the dwellings of the wealthy and the not so wealthy was much greater than it had ever been... [After 1880] .... Amassed wealth and extravagant fortunes advertised openly. The decorous house of the well-to-do could now lapse without embarrassment into the gaudy or the grand. It was in that environment that the Semple family chose to build a splendid and magnificent palace. One architectural historian writes that houses built in the style of the Second Italian Renaissance Revival were “based on the palaces of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian Renaissance. Symmetrical stone or stuccoes structures with red tiled hipped roofs and substantial cornices supported with brackets or consoles were typical of these houses. They generally had more varied facades than houses of the early Italian Renaissance Revival of the mid-nineteenth century. Entrances were often marked with either a projecting portico or recessed loggia emphasized with an arched Palladian motif. . . [T]he building exemplifies the grandiose assertion of the Italian palazzo. The Semple House was designed and built at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when, art critic Robert Hughes has written, ‘The American appetite for grandeur reach its apogee.” The three decades from the mid-1870s to the early 1900s have been christened the Gilded Age. It was a time of unfettered industrial expansion, unassailable and mutually interlocking trusts and no personal income tax. “After 1870,” writes Hughes, “America lost all its Puritan inhibitions about the gratuitous display of surplus wealth. It was European aristocracies from which American architects took their inspiration. Robert Twombly explains the inspiration in this way: The very rich were drawn to several styles for the dwellings with which they declared their social arrival. The styles are the Chateauesque, typified by Richard Morris Hunt’s work for the Vanderbilt family, and the neo-Renaissance, popularized in the United States by McKim, Mead and White. What the two styles shared and perhaps exhibited better than other possibilities was their association with prior aristocracies. During his practice of architecture Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) established himself as the most influential architect of his time in the United States. Some of his most spectacular buildings were derived from French chateaux. Hunt, the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was in Paris^^ at the time that the Chateauesque style was enjoying a revival. In its sixteenth century inception, the Chateauesque was a synthesis of Italian Renaissance and native Gothic forms. Hunt’s first work in the style in the United States was an 1882 mansion in New York City for the Vanderbilt family The house was described by the American architecture critic, Montgomery Schuyler, as a reference “to the romantic classicism of the great chateaux of the Loire.” Hunt was a strong influence on his peers, who began designing chateaux for their own clients. According to Twombly, “The Michigan, Woodward and Commonwealth Avenues of the nation’s cities and the Newport and North Shore vacation colonies were dotted with Loire and other chateaux, collectively the most lavish architectural manifestation of recently acquired personal wealth ever seen in this country.” ^ The most magnificent and ambitious example of the style remains Hunt’s own “Biltmore” (1888-1895) built for George Washington Vanderbilt in North Carolina. Hunt’s other great mansion, completed the year he died, is The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II and inspired by sixteenth century Genoa Robert Hughes has called Hunt “the Bernini of the swells.... Wealth on the scale of the 1880s in the U.S. was still uncharted territory. Its signs could get crossed. So, the plutocrat needed an architect to create a seamless etiquette of shared ostentation, with variants, and that was what Hunt did with Newport, Rhode Island.” McKim, Mead & White were inspired by the Renaissance palazzo, particularly the palazzi of Florence. This building “craze,” according to Twombly, was “the very process of elite consciousness and a quest for control” over one’s environment. There was also “the rising demand by princes and urban eUtes for grandeur and show, order and ample space, finesse and finished surfaces.” Twombly argues that the same motives were present among the newly rich of the late 19th century. The new industrialists, still first or second-generation Americans, “wanted to make their cultural mark, to distinguish themselves from the rest of society, to express their impressive power, perhaps also to disguise from themselves and others the grubby ways in which they had accumulated that power. The Quattrocento remained so architecturally potent that it made real the legitimacy of the new national elite. By the mid-1880s wealthy Minneapolitans were moving away from the center of downtown to new neighborhoods, including the Park Avenue and Coring Park-Haw home Avenue districts. The city’s elite began building mansions south of downtown on Park Avenue after William Washburn built a magnificent Queen Anne house with hints of Romanesque Revival at 22nd Street and Stevens Avenue (1884, razed). From 1880 to 1900 ‘large, often architect-designed houses were spaced [on Park] between Franklin Avenue and 26th Street by people who were bank officers and industry executives. But the building boom here was short-lived, and it changed character steadily after the turn of the century. The last of the great Park Avenue houses was constructed in 1921 More magnificent homes were constructed near Coring Park, culminating with the Samuel Gale House (1889, razed), a Richardsonian Romanesque house designed by LeRoy Buffington. The Semple House was one of several houses constructed in Minnesota in the Second Renaissance Revival style. A much simpler and smaller version of the style is seen in the Peavey House at 2222 Park Avenue in Minneapolis. The two-story house is perfectly symmetrical. Its graceful projecting portico on the first floor is topped by a three-part stone balustrade. Like the Semple House, the Peavey house has a hipped roof which is nearly hidden by large, overhanging boxed eaves. The buff-colored brick shows no variation between stories. While the houses are built in the same style, the Peavey House does not share the Semple House’s richness of detail. The Peavey House has been converted to offices and currently is the location of an insurance brokerage. Another Minneapolis house constructed in the Second Renaissance Revival style is the Charles Harrington House at 2540 Park Avenue. Built of creamy, pale-yellow brick, the three-story house has a symmetrical facade and red tiled hipped roof. The Harrington House is larger and more imposing than the Peavey House. The brick on the first floor is rusticated, but the brick on the upper floors is smooth. The house has two bay windows on either side of the columned front porch. There are tall, double hung windows on the second floor and smaller, almost square windows on the third floor. The house has a den tiled cornice and boxed, overhanging eaves. The Harrington House is now occupied by the Zuhrah Temple, a fraternal organization. A modem addition, which is as big as the original house, has been added on the north side. The Peavey and Harrington Houses exemplify quite faithfully the details of the Second Renaissance Revival style. They imitate the Renaissance, but the Semple House attempts to outdo it. It has more of everything; larger size, more elaborate window treatments, stone quoins on the comers of the building, distinctive variations between stories which are separated by belt courses, imposing facades on two sides of the house, and a separate carnage house built in the same style and materials as the Semple House. When architects Franklin Long and Louis Long began designing the Semple House, they were working almost in the shadow of the George H. Partridge House at 1 Groveland Terrace in Minneapolis. The Partridge House was about one-mile northwest of the site of the Semple House. It was built in 1897 and tom down in the mid-twentieth century to make way for a highway. The Partridge House was designed by Franklin Long and Frederick Kees. It was one of the grandest houses in late 19th century Minneapolis, the epitome of the Second Renaissance Revival style. Though the Partridge House was larger and even more imposing than the Semple House, the two houses shared many similar characteristics. The historical record does not say, but the Semples may have hired Franklin Long to design their house because they wanted to replicate, at least in part, the Partridge House. The Partridge and Semple Houses and others built along Park Avenue and in the Lowry Hill neighborhood were the last mansions to be built in close proximity to downtown Minneapolis. The Semple House mimics the Partridge House in many ways. Like the Partridge House, the Semple House is a massive three-story structure with a columned entrance portico, symmetrical facades, tripartite windows on the first and second floors, small square -windows on the third floor, balustrades on the roofline, ren tiled cornices under large boxed eaves, a red-tiled hipped roof and stone chimneys The Semple House, which is set on a comparatively small comer lot, has two facades which look out onto busy streets. The Partridge House was also located on the comer of two busy streets and occupied most of its lot. A 1904 historic photograph showed the house was set back only about twenty feet from Groveland Terrace and approximately ten feet from Hennepin Avenue. A stone retaining wall surrounded the house and was topped by shrubbery and other plantings. The retaining wall and the steps which go up to the portico also gave the house a fortress-like appearance. The Semple House differs from the Partridge House in its use of rusticated brick on the first story, the distinctive horizontal belt courses which separate each story and the nearly flat facades. The Partridge House had bay windows flanking the front portico, bays which projected in a half-circle on the front and sides of the house, and awnings covering the windows on the south side of the house. The Semple House is significant because it is a fine example of the Second Renaissance Revival style. Houses built in the Second Renaissance Revival style represent continuity. They look to the past—the Renaissance—for their stylistic details. They also look to the future. As the 20th century dawned, the Semples were constructing their house as a symbol of their success. Though they looked back to Europe and to the 15th century for their inspiration, the Semples built their house as a monument to a quintessentially American success story; a fortune made in trade, over a very short period of time, by family without deep roots in the community. At the time the Semple house was constructed, LaSalle Avenue was one of the principal residential avenues in the city of Minneapolis. It was a “grand” avenue in the style of many which were built in other American cities in the late nineteenth century. The editors of The Grand American Avenue, a book published by the American Architectural Foundation, describe the promenades of elegant residences as “advertisements of achievement. That the grand avenue emerged in an age of extraordinary growth nationwide owed much to the commercial and social eminence of the patrons who created these streets. Through their coherence and genuine grandeur, grand avenues acquired a certain notoriety as self-contained communities even as they asserted a dignified vision of urban life, an integrating element that went straight to the heart of the town’s identity.” They also describe one common trait among most grand avenue dwellers: “a genuine appreciation for the design arts...these people embraced the inherent value of fine art and architecture by investing huge fortunes in their houses, furniture, paintings, art objects... and the streets themselves. A diversity of styles gathered along most grand avenues, together adding up to a larger architectural idea that brought all the variations into harmony. The street was the place for builders and architects to show off, and their clients happily obliged.” The classicism based on the model of the Italian Renaissance came to dominate commercial and public architecture in Minneapolis in the 1890s. Millett writes of the style and how its dominance was short-lived: “The theme of classicism is continuity. The classically styled buildings that rose...at the turn of the century were intended to suggest a visible link to an older order of things. But the link to the past has always been weak in American cities, where every day is the day of the dollar and commerce prefers the future tense. The new century, despite its classical beginnings, was to prove to be not much different from the old--change, not continuity, was its hallmark. If the most influential architects of the day worked mostly on the east coast of the United States, their influence was felt throughout the United States. When the Semples selected an architect for their Franklin Avenue house, they chose a Franklin Bidwell Long and his son Louis Long. Franklin Long had, together with his partner Frederick Kees, designed some of the most significant public buildings in Minneapolis. The Architects: Franklin Bidwell Long and Louis Long Franklin Long was born in Afton, New York in 1842, studied architecture in Chicago and came to Minneapolis in 1868. He formed a productive partnership with Frederick Kees in the 1880s. Long and Kees practiced architecture at a time when the milling industry was flourishing and the city of Minneapolis was beginning to develop as a regional trade center. The new prosperity also encouraged a greater interest in architectural style and caused a building boom in the central business district. Franklin Long was the architect (with Charles Haglin) of Minneapolis City Hall (1873, razed) at Bridge Square and Minneapolis Central High School (1878, razed) at Eleventh Street and Fourth Avenue South. Long and Kees designed the Masonic Temple Building (1888, extant) at 528 Hennepin Avenue. The Masonic Temple Building was restored in the late 1970s and is now the Hennepin Center for the Arts. “ The firm of Long and Kees also designed the City Hall and Hennepin County Courthouse Building (1888, extant) at Fifth Street and Third Avenue.'^ The building is now Minneapolis City Hall; the courthouse moved to the Hennepin County Government Center which was built in 1967. Long and Kees were the designers of the Minneapolis Public Library (1889, razed) at Tenth Street and Hennepin Avenue'*”' and one of the grandest Beaux-Arts mansions of the 1890s, the George H. Partridge house (1897, razed) at One Groveland Terrace.' They were awarded the commission to design the Public Library in a competition with eight other firms, all of whom submitted designs in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The library’s massive comer towers, arcaded windows and heavy, solid appearance resembled the old Minneapolis City Hall. After his partnership with Frederick Kees, Franklin Long formed a partnership with his son Louis Long and with Lowell Lamoreaux. Among their commissions was the Radisson Hotel (1909, razed) on South Seventh Street between Nicollet and Hennepin Avenues. “The old Radisson was tom down in 1982 and has been replaced by a new hotel, still called the Radisson. Louis Long designed Leslie House (1914, extant) at 2424 Lake Place and was associated with two Minneapolis architectural firms. Long and Thorshov and Long, Lamoreaux and Thorshov. The Owners: Anne Culbertson Semple n8??-19101 and Frank Bailey Semple (1851-19041) Frank Bailey Semple was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 24,1851. As a young man he worked as a clerk for the Perrin and Golf Manufacturing Company of Cincinnati, where he learned the hardware business. He became a traveling representative for the company, which had its headquarters at Jeffersonville, Indiana. In 1883 Mr. Semple named Aimed Culbertson, a banker’s daughter from New Albany, Indiana. Mr. and Mrs. Semple moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1884 and he bought an interest in the hardware business of Janney, Brooks and Company on Bridge Square.” Bridge Square, located on Hennepin Avenue adjacent to the Hennepin Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi River, was the central business district of early Minneapolis. When Mr. Semple joined the firm, it had been in existence for 18 years. The business was started in 1866 when Thomas B. Janney, his brother Edwin M. Janney and the Janneys’ brother-in-law Samuel T. Moles opened their retail hardware store. Janney and Moles was located in a two-story frame building on Washington Avenue between Nicollet and Minnetonka (now Marquette Avenue) Streets. The business diversified from retail only to a retail and wholesale business in hardware in 1875 when Thomas Janney acquired Governor John S. Pillsbury’s wholesale hardware business. Thomas B. Janney, Samuel T. Moles, Fred W. Brooks and George H. Eastman became partners as Janney, Moles, Brooks and Company. Two years later Mr. Moles retired and the firm became Janney, Brooks and Eastman. In 1883 Mr. Brooks died and Mr. Eastman retired. Frank Semple bought the Brooks interest the following year and the firm became Janney, Semple and Company. The retail business was sold in 1888 to W.K. Morison and Company. The firm then became an exclusively wholesale business. It moved to the newly constructed Mutual Block at the comer of Second Street and First Avenue. The Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads began to open up new territory for the business. In 1892 the firm issued an 1,105-page catalog which had more than 5,000 illustrations. It took two years to produce the catalog. In 1898 the firm became Janney, Semple, Hill and Company. ‘Hill” was Horace M. Hill, who had been with the business since 1879. Janney, Semple, Hill and Company produced another catalog in 1903. It showcased the firm’s ‘Invincible-Cleanable” refrigerators. (In the early years of the twentieth century Janney, Semple, Hill and Company took over the entire Mutual Block and built other warehouses nearby. In 1949 the firm acquired the North Star Woolen Plant, which meant it occupied the entire downtown Minneapolis block bounded by South Second and Third Avenues and First and Second Streets. The Janney, Semple firm was acquired by Coast-to-Coast stores in 1960. In 1965 the warehouses were demolished to make way for the redevelopment of the Gateway area of Minneapolis. On February 17,1904 Frank Semple died while visiting his sister in Camden, South Carolina from what the local newspapers described as “nervous prostration.”” He was 53 years old and had lived in the Semple house on Franklin Avenue for only three years. At the time of his death, he was vice president of Janney, Semple, Hill and Company. His wife and two children, Rebekah Cook Semple, age 19, and William Culbertson Semple, age 16, survived him. Mr. Semple’s funeral was held at his Franklin Avenue residence. He was buried in Lakewood Cemetery. In addition to his hardware interests, Mr. Semple was a member of the boards of directors of the National Bank of Commerce, the Minneapolis Plow Works and the North American Telegraph Company. He was a member of the Minneapolis, Commercial, Minnetonka, Lafayette and Minnetonka clubs and Westminster Presbyterian Church. In 1905 Anne Semple married Alonzo C. Rand, a widower and president of Minneapolis Gas Company. Mr. Rand’s father, who had invented a method of manufacturing illuminating gas from oil, was elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1878. Anne and Alonzo Rand lived in the Franklin Avenue house until Anne died of pneumonia in 1910. She was 50 years old. Alonzo Rand, a wealthy man in his own right, had signed an ante-nuptial agreement relinquishing any claim to Anne’s estate. The estate, which was worth about one million dollars, was divided between her children. Her son William, who was then 22 years old, got the Franklin Avenue house. He sold the house to Calvin Gibson Goodrich and his wife Cora Ferrin Goodrich. The Legacy- The House After the Semple Years (1910-1997) Calvin Goodrich came to Minnesota from Ohio in 1868 when he was twelve years old. Mr. Goodrich’s father was a physician and prominent abolitionist before and during the Civil War. Mr. Goodrich served successively as bookkeeper, superintendent, general manager, vice president and president ofthe Twin City Rapid Transit Company. He succeeded his brother-in-law, Thomas Lowry, as president ofthe company when Mr. Lowry died in 1909.®^ Calvin Goodrich died ofpneumonia at the Semple house in 1915 at the age of 59. His funeral was held at his home.®^ Cora Goodrich lived in the residence only until 1918 when she sold the house to Laura Day. After Laura Day died in 1935, the Semple house was acquired by Ministers Life and Casualty Union. The house became the headquarters of the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation of Greater Minneapolis in 1954. In 1961 it became the office of the Franklin National Bank. In the mid-1980s the property was purchased by the principals of Hills Gilbertson Architects, who occupied the upper floor of the carriage house. The Semple house was purchased by African American Family Services in 1996.
Anne C. Semple and Frank B. House
The Anne C. and Frank B. Semple House exemplifies the business success of one ofMinnesota’s most prosperous tum-of-the-century hardware merchants. The imposing exterior and richly detailed interior are symbols of the accomplishments of a man who was one ofthe creators of what one historian called “now and for years the largest hardware house in the northwest.” The grand and showy palace advertised the success of Frank Semple, a prominent Minneapolis businessman. Mr. Semple’s firm, Janney Semple and Company, was started on the Mississippi riverfront in 1866 and continued to exist, under slightly different names, until it was acquired by a national retailer in 1960. The house meets National Register Criterion C in the area of Architecture as an impressive and elaborate example of the Second Renaissance Revival style. The House: A Symbol of Success The Anne C. and Frank B. Semple House is one of a decreasing number of large houses in what was once a neighborhood of late nineteenth century brick and stone houses. The house is a symbol of the prosperity of Frank Semple, the hardware merchant, and his firm, Janney Semple and Company. The palatial residence was designed by Minneapolis architects who were known for their immense, attention-getting houses and their imposing public buildings. The Semple house is a representation of the Second Renaissance Revival style of architecture. Architecture critic Larry Millett has written about the popularity of this classic style and wryly remarked that it “was. . .popular for residences, perhaps because the style was associated with great wealth and good taste, two attributes that do not always coincide.” Renaissance Revival buildings are generally straight-fronted structures without any considerable projections or recessions in the main mass. They have symmetrical elevations crowned with bold cornices. Apart from rusticated quoins and a rusticated ground floor, the wall surfaces are usually smooth and plain, serving as a neutral background for windows, doorways and balustraded balconies. Stone and marble are the facing materials. The Revival opened with the Villard Houses in New York, whose design came from the office of McKim, Mead & White in 1883. “The Villard Houses were modeled after the late fourteenth-century Cancellara Palace in Rome. The houses adopted its rusticated ground story and its four types of windows. They omitted the two pilaster orders of Cancellara, thus making the facades simpler and flatter—and reversing the whole tendency of Italianate design. One of the most famous buildings of the Second Renaissance Revival is the Boston Public Library, built to the designs of McKim, Mead and White in 1888- 1892. “ Late nineteenth-century revivals, which are the Second Renaissance Revival styles, are larger, grander and more elaborate than earlier nineteenth-century style revivals. They tend to be stately rather than exciting, “correct” rather than daring. Characteristic of the Renaissance are arched openings, rusticated masonry laid with deep joints to give the appearance of massiveness, and strong horizontal lines. Cornices are finely detailed and moldings are crisply drawn. A critic of American design, Spiro Kostof, writes about the Renaissance style as it manifested itself at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘The houses now no longer depended for their effect on fancy landscaping and a large lot, but rather tended toward a public presence by favoring a large shape on a relatively small lot.... The styles strained for a public, imposing look.... Something else was different too. The difference between the dwellings of the wealthy and the not so wealthy was much greater than it had ever been... [After 1880] .... Amassed wealth and extravagant fortunes advertised openly. The decorous house of the well-to-do could now lapse without embarrassment into the gaudy or the grand. It was in that environment that the Semple family chose to build a splendid and magnificent palace. One architectural historian writes that houses built in the style of the Second Italian Renaissance Revival were “based on the palaces of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian Renaissance. Symmetrical stone or stuccoes structures with red tiled hipped roofs and substantial cornices supported with brackets or consoles were typical of these houses. They generally had more varied facades than houses of the early Italian Renaissance Revival of the mid-nineteenth century. Entrances were often marked with either a projecting portico or recessed loggia emphasized with an arched Palladian motif. . . [T]he building exemplifies the grandiose assertion of the Italian palazzo. The Semple House was designed and built at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when, art critic Robert Hughes has written, ‘The American appetite for grandeur reach its apogee.” The three decades from the mid-1870s to the early 1900s have been christened the Gilded Age. It was a time of unfettered industrial expansion, unassailable and mutually interlocking trusts and no personal income tax. “After 1870,” writes Hughes, “America lost all its Puritan inhibitions about the gratuitous display of surplus wealth. It was European aristocracies from which American architects took their inspiration. Robert Twombly explains the inspiration in this way: The very rich were drawn to several styles for the dwellings with which they declared their social arrival. The styles are the Chateauesque, typified by Richard Morris Hunt’s work for the Vanderbilt family, and the neo-Renaissance, popularized in the United States by McKim, Mead and White. What the two styles shared and perhaps exhibited better than other possibilities was their association with prior aristocracies. During his practice of architecture Richard Morris Hunt (1827-1895) established himself as the most influential architect of his time in the United States. Some of his most spectacular buildings were derived from French chateaux. Hunt, the first American to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, was in Paris^^ at the time that the Chateauesque style was enjoying a revival. In its sixteenth century inception, the Chateauesque was a synthesis of Italian Renaissance and native Gothic forms. Hunt’s first work in the style in the United States was an 1882 mansion in New York City for the Vanderbilt family The house was described by the American architecture critic, Montgomery Schuyler, as a reference “to the romantic classicism of the great chateaux of the Loire.” Hunt was a strong influence on his peers, who began designing chateaux for their own clients. According to Twombly, “The Michigan, Woodward and Commonwealth Avenues of the nation’s cities and the Newport and North Shore vacation colonies were dotted with Loire and other chateaux, collectively the most lavish architectural manifestation of recently acquired personal wealth ever seen in this country.” ^ The most magnificent and ambitious example of the style remains Hunt’s own “Biltmore” (1888-1895) built for George Washington Vanderbilt in North Carolina. Hunt’s other great mansion, completed the year he died, is The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, built for Cornelius Vanderbilt II and inspired by sixteenth century Genoa Robert Hughes has called Hunt “the Bernini of the swells.... Wealth on the scale of the 1880s in the U.S. was still uncharted territory. Its signs could get crossed. So, the plutocrat needed an architect to create a seamless etiquette of shared ostentation, with variants, and that was what Hunt did with Newport, Rhode Island.” McKim, Mead & White were inspired by the Renaissance palazzo, particularly the palazzi of Florence. This building “craze,” according to Twombly, was “the very process of elite consciousness and a quest for control” over one’s environment. There was also “the rising demand by princes and urban eUtes for grandeur and show, order and ample space, finesse and finished surfaces.” Twombly argues that the same motives were present among the newly rich of the late 19th century. The new industrialists, still first or second-generation Americans, “wanted to make their cultural mark, to distinguish themselves from the rest of society, to express their impressive power, perhaps also to disguise from themselves and others the grubby ways in which they had accumulated that power. The Quattrocento remained so architecturally potent that it made real the legitimacy of the new national elite. By the mid-1880s wealthy Minneapolitans were moving away from the center of downtown to new neighborhoods, including the Park Avenue and Coring Park-Haw home Avenue districts. The city’s elite began building mansions south of downtown on Park Avenue after William Washburn built a magnificent Queen Anne house with hints of Romanesque Revival at 22nd Street and Stevens Avenue (1884, razed). From 1880 to 1900 ‘large, often architect-designed houses were spaced [on Park] between Franklin Avenue and 26th Street by people who were bank officers and industry executives. But the building boom here was short-lived, and it changed character steadily after the turn of the century. The last of the great Park Avenue houses was constructed in 1921 More magnificent homes were constructed near Coring Park, culminating with the Samuel Gale House (1889, razed), a Richardsonian Romanesque house designed by LeRoy Buffington. The Semple House was one of several houses constructed in Minnesota in the Second Renaissance Revival style. A much simpler and smaller version of the style is seen in the Peavey House at 2222 Park Avenue in Minneapolis. The two-story house is perfectly symmetrical. Its graceful projecting portico on the first floor is topped by a three-part stone balustrade. Like the Semple House, the Peavey house has a hipped roof which is nearly hidden by large, overhanging boxed eaves. The buff-colored brick shows no variation between stories. While the houses are built in the same style, the Peavey House does not share the Semple House’s richness of detail. The Peavey House has been converted to offices and currently is the location of an insurance brokerage. Another Minneapolis house constructed in the Second Renaissance Revival style is the Charles Harrington House at 2540 Park Avenue. Built of creamy, pale-yellow brick, the three-story house has a symmetrical facade and red tiled hipped roof. The Harrington House is larger and more imposing than the Peavey House. The brick on the first floor is rusticated, but the brick on the upper floors is smooth. The house has two bay windows on either side of the columned front porch. There are tall, double hung windows on the second floor and smaller, almost square windows on the third floor. The house has a den tiled cornice and boxed, overhanging eaves. The Harrington House is now occupied by the Zuhrah Temple, a fraternal organization. A modem addition, which is as big as the original house, has been added on the north side. The Peavey and Harrington Houses exemplify quite faithfully the details of the Second Renaissance Revival style. They imitate the Renaissance, but the Semple House attempts to outdo it. It has more of everything; larger size, more elaborate window treatments, stone quoins on the comers of the building, distinctive variations between stories which are separated by belt courses, imposing facades on two sides of the house, and a separate carnage house built in the same style and materials as the Semple House. When architects Franklin Long and Louis Long began designing the Semple House, they were working almost in the shadow of the George H. Partridge House at 1 Groveland Terrace in Minneapolis. The Partridge House was about one-mile northwest of the site of the Semple House. It was built in 1897 and tom down in the mid-twentieth century to make way for a highway. The Partridge House was designed by Franklin Long and Frederick Kees. It was one of the grandest houses in late 19th century Minneapolis, the epitome of the Second Renaissance Revival style. Though the Partridge House was larger and even more imposing than the Semple House, the two houses shared many similar characteristics. The historical record does not say, but the Semples may have hired Franklin Long to design their house because they wanted to replicate, at least in part, the Partridge House. The Partridge and Semple Houses and others built along Park Avenue and in the Lowry Hill neighborhood were the last mansions to be built in close proximity to downtown Minneapolis. The Semple House mimics the Partridge House in many ways. Like the Partridge House, the Semple House is a massive three-story structure with a columned entrance portico, symmetrical facades, tripartite windows on the first and second floors, small square -windows on the third floor, balustrades on the roofline, ren tiled cornices under large boxed eaves, a red-tiled hipped roof and stone chimneys The Semple House, which is set on a comparatively small comer lot, has two facades which look out onto busy streets. The Partridge House was also located on the comer of two busy streets and occupied most of its lot. A 1904 historic photograph showed the house was set back only about twenty feet from Groveland Terrace and approximately ten feet from Hennepin Avenue. A stone retaining wall surrounded the house and was topped by shrubbery and other plantings. The retaining wall and the steps which go up to the portico also gave the house a fortress-like appearance. The Semple House differs from the Partridge House in its use of rusticated brick on the first story, the distinctive horizontal belt courses which separate each story and the nearly flat facades. The Partridge House had bay windows flanking the front portico, bays which projected in a half-circle on the front and sides of the house, and awnings covering the windows on the south side of the house. The Semple House is significant because it is a fine example of the Second Renaissance Revival style. Houses built in the Second Renaissance Revival style represent continuity. They look to the past—the Renaissance—for their stylistic details. They also look to the future. As the 20th century dawned, the Semples were constructing their house as a symbol of their success. Though they looked back to Europe and to the 15th century for their inspiration, the Semples built their house as a monument to a quintessentially American success story; a fortune made in trade, over a very short period of time, by family without deep roots in the community. At the time the Semple house was constructed, LaSalle Avenue was one of the principal residential avenues in the city of Minneapolis. It was a “grand” avenue in the style of many which were built in other American cities in the late nineteenth century. The editors of The Grand American Avenue, a book published by the American Architectural Foundation, describe the promenades of elegant residences as “advertisements of achievement. That the grand avenue emerged in an age of extraordinary growth nationwide owed much to the commercial and social eminence of the patrons who created these streets. Through their coherence and genuine grandeur, grand avenues acquired a certain notoriety as self-contained communities even as they asserted a dignified vision of urban life, an integrating element that went straight to the heart of the town’s identity.” They also describe one common trait among most grand avenue dwellers: “a genuine appreciation for the design arts...these people embraced the inherent value of fine art and architecture by investing huge fortunes in their houses, furniture, paintings, art objects... and the streets themselves. A diversity of styles gathered along most grand avenues, together adding up to a larger architectural idea that brought all the variations into harmony. The street was the place for builders and architects to show off, and their clients happily obliged.” The classicism based on the model of the Italian Renaissance came to dominate commercial and public architecture in Minneapolis in the 1890s. Millett writes of the style and how its dominance was short-lived: “The theme of classicism is continuity. The classically styled buildings that rose...at the turn of the century were intended to suggest a visible link to an older order of things. But the link to the past has always been weak in American cities, where every day is the day of the dollar and commerce prefers the future tense. The new century, despite its classical beginnings, was to prove to be not much different from the old--change, not continuity, was its hallmark. If the most influential architects of the day worked mostly on the east coast of the United States, their influence was felt throughout the United States. When the Semples selected an architect for their Franklin Avenue house, they chose a Franklin Bidwell Long and his son Louis Long. Franklin Long had, together with his partner Frederick Kees, designed some of the most significant public buildings in Minneapolis. The Architects: Franklin Bidwell Long and Louis Long Franklin Long was born in Afton, New York in 1842, studied architecture in Chicago and came to Minneapolis in 1868. He formed a productive partnership with Frederick Kees in the 1880s. Long and Kees practiced architecture at a time when the milling industry was flourishing and the city of Minneapolis was beginning to develop as a regional trade center. The new prosperity also encouraged a greater interest in architectural style and caused a building boom in the central business district. Franklin Long was the architect (with Charles Haglin) of Minneapolis City Hall (1873, razed) at Bridge Square and Minneapolis Central High School (1878, razed) at Eleventh Street and Fourth Avenue South. Long and Kees designed the Masonic Temple Building (1888, extant) at 528 Hennepin Avenue. The Masonic Temple Building was restored in the late 1970s and is now the Hennepin Center for the Arts. “ The firm of Long and Kees also designed the City Hall and Hennepin County Courthouse Building (1888, extant) at Fifth Street and Third Avenue.'^ The building is now Minneapolis City Hall; the courthouse moved to the Hennepin County Government Center which was built in 1967. Long and Kees were the designers of the Minneapolis Public Library (1889, razed) at Tenth Street and Hennepin Avenue'*”' and one of the grandest Beaux-Arts mansions of the 1890s, the George H. Partridge house (1897, razed) at One Groveland Terrace.' They were awarded the commission to design the Public Library in a competition with eight other firms, all of whom submitted designs in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The library’s massive comer towers, arcaded windows and heavy, solid appearance resembled the old Minneapolis City Hall. After his partnership with Frederick Kees, Franklin Long formed a partnership with his son Louis Long and with Lowell Lamoreaux. Among their commissions was the Radisson Hotel (1909, razed) on South Seventh Street between Nicollet and Hennepin Avenues. “The old Radisson was tom down in 1982 and has been replaced by a new hotel, still called the Radisson. Louis Long designed Leslie House (1914, extant) at 2424 Lake Place and was associated with two Minneapolis architectural firms. Long and Thorshov and Long, Lamoreaux and Thorshov. The Owners: Anne Culbertson Semple n8??-19101 and Frank Bailey Semple (1851-19041) Frank Bailey Semple was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on January 24,1851. As a young man he worked as a clerk for the Perrin and Golf Manufacturing Company of Cincinnati, where he learned the hardware business. He became a traveling representative for the company, which had its headquarters at Jeffersonville, Indiana. In 1883 Mr. Semple named Aimed Culbertson, a banker’s daughter from New Albany, Indiana. Mr. and Mrs. Semple moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1884 and he bought an interest in the hardware business of Janney, Brooks and Company on Bridge Square.” Bridge Square, located on Hennepin Avenue adjacent to the Hennepin Avenue Bridge over the Mississippi River, was the central business district of early Minneapolis. When Mr. Semple joined the firm, it had been in existence for 18 years. The business was started in 1866 when Thomas B. Janney, his brother Edwin M. Janney and the Janneys’ brother-in-law Samuel T. Moles opened their retail hardware store. Janney and Moles was located in a two-story frame building on Washington Avenue between Nicollet and Minnetonka (now Marquette Avenue) Streets. The business diversified from retail only to a retail and wholesale business in hardware in 1875 when Thomas Janney acquired Governor John S. Pillsbury’s wholesale hardware business. Thomas B. Janney, Samuel T. Moles, Fred W. Brooks and George H. Eastman became partners as Janney, Moles, Brooks and Company. Two years later Mr. Moles retired and the firm became Janney, Brooks and Eastman. In 1883 Mr. Brooks died and Mr. Eastman retired. Frank Semple bought the Brooks interest the following year and the firm became Janney, Semple and Company. The retail business was sold in 1888 to W.K. Morison and Company. The firm then became an exclusively wholesale business. It moved to the newly constructed Mutual Block at the comer of Second Street and First Avenue. The Great Northern and Northern Pacific Railroads began to open up new territory for the business. In 1892 the firm issued an 1,105-page catalog which had more than 5,000 illustrations. It took two years to produce the catalog. In 1898 the firm became Janney, Semple, Hill and Company. ‘Hill” was Horace M. Hill, who had been with the business since 1879. Janney, Semple, Hill and Company produced another catalog in 1903. It showcased the firm’s ‘Invincible-Cleanable” refrigerators. (In the early years of the twentieth century Janney, Semple, Hill and Company took over the entire Mutual Block and built other warehouses nearby. In 1949 the firm acquired the North Star Woolen Plant, which meant it occupied the entire downtown Minneapolis block bounded by South Second and Third Avenues and First and Second Streets. The Janney, Semple firm was acquired by Coast-to-Coast stores in 1960. In 1965 the warehouses were demolished to make way for the redevelopment of the Gateway area of Minneapolis. On February 17,1904 Frank Semple died while visiting his sister in Camden, South Carolina from what the local newspapers described as “nervous prostration.”” He was 53 years old and had lived in the Semple house on Franklin Avenue for only three years. At the time of his death, he was vice president of Janney, Semple, Hill and Company. His wife and two children, Rebekah Cook Semple, age 19, and William Culbertson Semple, age 16, survived him. Mr. Semple’s funeral was held at his Franklin Avenue residence. He was buried in Lakewood Cemetery. In addition to his hardware interests, Mr. Semple was a member of the boards of directors of the National Bank of Commerce, the Minneapolis Plow Works and the North American Telegraph Company. He was a member of the Minneapolis, Commercial, Minnetonka, Lafayette and Minnetonka clubs and Westminster Presbyterian Church. In 1905 Anne Semple married Alonzo C. Rand, a widower and president of Minneapolis Gas Company. Mr. Rand’s father, who had invented a method of manufacturing illuminating gas from oil, was elected mayor of Minneapolis in 1878. Anne and Alonzo Rand lived in the Franklin Avenue house until Anne died of pneumonia in 1910. She was 50 years old. Alonzo Rand, a wealthy man in his own right, had signed an ante-nuptial agreement relinquishing any claim to Anne’s estate. The estate, which was worth about one million dollars, was divided between her children. Her son William, who was then 22 years old, got the Franklin Avenue house. He sold the house to Calvin Gibson Goodrich and his wife Cora Ferrin Goodrich. The Legacy- The House After the Semple Years (1910-1997) Calvin Goodrich came to Minnesota from Ohio in 1868 when he was twelve years old. Mr. Goodrich’s father was a physician and prominent abolitionist before and during the Civil War. Mr. Goodrich served successively as bookkeeper, superintendent, general manager, vice president and president ofthe Twin City Rapid Transit Company. He succeeded his brother-in-law, Thomas Lowry, as president ofthe company when Mr. Lowry died in 1909.®^ Calvin Goodrich died ofpneumonia at the Semple house in 1915 at the age of 59. His funeral was held at his home.®^ Cora Goodrich lived in the residence only until 1918 when she sold the house to Laura Day. After Laura Day died in 1935, the Semple house was acquired by Ministers Life and Casualty Union. The house became the headquarters of the United Cerebral Palsy Foundation of Greater Minneapolis in 1954. In 1961 it became the office of the Franklin National Bank. In the mid-1980s the property was purchased by the principals of Hills Gilbertson Architects, who occupied the upper floor of the carriage house. The Semple house was purchased by African American Family Services in 1996.
Feb 26, 1998
Posted Date
Mar 10, 2022
Historical Record Date
Feb 26, 1998
Source Name
United States Department of Interior - National Park Service
