4200 W 44th St
Edina, MN, USA

Jonathan Taylor Grimes House

The Jonathan Taylor Grimes House is one of the oldest standing houses in Edina, Minnesota, United States.


Description and history

It was built in 1869, and appears to have been influenced by Andrew Jackson Downing's book The Architecture of Country Houses. The house is a 1½ story frame cottage with intersecting gable roofs, dormers, a bay window, and a shallow front porch. Gothic Revival details are found in the second-story windows, the steeply pitched roof lines, and the gabled wall dormers. Some Italianate influences are also present in the shallow portico and the wide eaves with scroll-cut brackets. The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976.

The owner of the house, Jonathan Taylor Grimes, was an early settler in the Edina area and a pioneer horticulturist.[2] Grimes was born in Leesburg, Virginia in 1818 and moved to Terre Haute, Indiana in 1840. He married Eliza Angeline Gordon in 1843. Eliza and Jonathan, along with three small children, moved to Saint Anthony in 1854. In 1859, Grimes and a partner, William Rheem, purchased 160 acres (65 ha) in the southwest corner of what was then Richfield Township. This land included the Waterville Mill on Minnehaha Creek. The mill was later known as the Buckwater Mill, then the Browndale Mill, and finally the Edina Mill. Grimes later obtained a quit claim deed to 160 acres (65 ha) north and east of the mill, where he built the house in 1869. In 1867, Grimes and Rheem sold the mill, and Grimes went on to become the first president of the Minnesota Horticultural Society. He conducted a variety of agricultural experiments, and he was responsible for introducing ginkgo and catalpa trees to Minnesota.

Eliza Grimes died in 1902, and her husband died in 1903. After his death, the farmstead was subdivided. It became the Morningside area, a streetcar suburb. Morningside seceded from Edina in 1920, then rejoined Edina in 1966. Grimes Avenue in Edina is named for him, and Alden Drive is named for his son.

National Register of Historic Places - Jonathan Taylor Grimes House

Statement of Significance:

Jonathan Taylor Grimes was born in Leesburg, Loudoun County, Virginia on May 10, 1818. He came to Minnesota in 1855. In 1859 he purchased the Waterville Mill (later the Edina Mill) along with 160 acres of land in what is now northeast Edina. He built a new and better dam and made other improvements to the mill. During the Civil War the mill ran day and night griding out flour requisitioned by the government for the soldiers at Fort Snelling. Grimes wrote that the only chance he had to rest was on the journey home from the Fort. After delivering his flour, he would catch what sleep he could stretch out on the bottom of the wagon. Grimes sold the mill in 1869 and turned to farming.

One of the most active pioneer horticulturists in the state, Jonathan Grimes started the Lake Calhoun Nursery on his land in northeast Edina in 1866 and operated it until his retirement in 1883., Grimes was a charter member of the Minnesota Horticultural Society. He served as its first president and continued in this office for many years.

Grimes not only owned and operated the Lake Calhoun Nursery but also a large apple orchard and farm in northeast Edina. He introduced the first harvester used in Hennepin County. In his nursery he grew the first Gingko tree in the state and one of the few in the country at the time. He also planted one of the first catalpa trees in Minnesota. The large shade trees along Nicollet, Hennepin, Lyndale and University Avenues in Minneapolis came from Grimes nursery.

The Jonathan Grimes House is one of the few remaining Gothic Revival style houses in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.