825 Fairmount Ave
St Paul, MN 55105, USA

825 Fairmount Avenue, Saint Paul, MN For Sale

Property Description:
Own a piece of history. This amazing Victorian house was the home of Amelia Earhart. There are fabulous high ceilings and vintage details throughout the home including many leaded glass windows, built-ins, and hardwood floors. It is loaded with natural light with sun-filled rooms. Enjoy the seasons on the enclosed front screen porch with a bottle of wine from the custom-built 1000+ bottle wine cellar. You can walk to everything you need, restaurants, coffee, shopping, parks and more. All situated in one of the best blocks of Summit Hill!

Amelia Earhart in St. Paul: A brief stay was marred by sad times

Amelia Earhart in St. Paul: A brief stay was marred by sad times
MARCH 3, 2019
LISA L. HEINRICH

Over a hundred years ago, high school students in Saint Paul were enjoying Central High School’s new location at Marshall and Lexington. A new school building, designed by local architect Clarence H. Johnston, had been erected in 1912. Little did those students know that in their midst was a woman who would become one of the most famous Americans of all time.

Central High School has several claims to fame, including being the oldest high school in the state (formerly St. Paul High School, founded 1866) and boasting famed alumni like Gordon Parks, Charles Schulz and Dave Winfield. Yet the short presence of Amelia Earhart rivals the school’s other bragging points in importance.

Amelia’s family consisted of her mother Amy, her father Edwin, and her sister Muriel. Both her parents had grown up in Kansas, Amy as the indulged daughter of a prosperous Atchison family living on Quality Hill, Edwin as the hardworking son of a poor minister. Amy’s father disapproved of their marriage, and required the young attorney Edwin to wait until he was earning 50 dollars a month before he reluctantly allowed them to marry.

The Earharts moved to Des Moines, Iowa, in 1908 when Edwin was offered a permanent position in the claims department of the Rock Island Railroad. It took Amy a year to find a house she thought suitable, during which time the girls stayed in Atchison with their grandparents. Edwin initially prospered in the job, and the family did well financially during this period, enough that they could afford to spend four summers on Lake Okabena in Worthington, Minnesota.

Until this point, the two Earhart girls apparently had an idyllic childhood. They were very active and spent much time outdoors. They didn’t play with dolls, but had a .22 rifle as a gift from their father, which they used to shoot rats; he also got them boys’ sleds and footballs. He took them fishing and played “cowboys and Indians” with them. They were quite adventurous and built their own small roller coaster after seeing one at the St. Louis World’s Fair. They read voraciously and had a strong sense of justice and fairness, cultivated by their mother.

But, during the time in Des Moines, the family’s world began to crumble. As biographer Susan Butler describes it in East to the Dawn, “From a childhood spent with caring parents and grandparents, in comfort, surrounded by friends, all wants fulfilled, they would be plunged into the dismal ranks of broken homes and poverty. Des Moines marked the beginning of the end of Amelia’s childhood.”

Edwin had begun to drink. Heavily. Amelia’s sister Muriel writes in her biography, Amelia, My Courageous Sister: “… the shadows began to fall on our gifted father, and the amenities of life had to be sacrificed for the necessities of existence.”

In short, Edwin’s drinking eventually cost him his job, and “the reason for his release spread through the close-knit world of railroading,” Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon recount in Amelia. After a long job search, Edwin was offered a job as a clerk in the freight office for the Great Northern Railway in St. Paul. It was a decided reduction in status, but it was a steady job, and so the family moved to St. Paul in spring 1913. The journey to Saint Paul was disorganized and “lugubrious,” as Amy wept when they left Des Moines.

Edwin’s drinking continued to cause problems, unfortunately, and the family was in reduced circumstances. They rented a house at 825 Fairmount, but couldn’t afford the heating bills in cold weather, and so lived in a couple of rooms and shut the rest off. They had to scrimp on everything, such that the girls walked long distances to save money. When Edwin stumbled from a streetcar and was hit by an automobile, the $10 hospital bill set them back so badly there was no money for Easter outfits. According to Doris Rich in Amelia Earhart, “Amelia made Easter outfits for herself and Muriel, old blouses trimmed with new ribbons, and skirts from silk curtains stored in the attic. Thread, ribbons, and buttons were bought with $3.40 earned by selling empty bottles she and Muriel found in the cellar.”

In these reduced circumstances, the family endured ostracism even from relatives. Amy’s uncle, Charles Otis, was a respected man from a respected St. Paul family; George Otis had served as a state legislator and as mayor of St. Paul, and the family law firm had been established in 1857. Charles paid a short, perfunctory call on the Earharts and then ignored them. As it turned out, Amy’s brother Mark had undermined her relationship with her once-beloved uncle. Later it was discovered Mark had been mishandling the family estate, and likely hadn’t sent Amy money that was her due and that he told Charles he had sent.

Once, Muriel recounts, the girls were walking because they were one penny short of enough cash for a streetcar ride: “Homeward bound, laden with bundles and facing a biting wind, we felt an even more painful experience. Our great-uncle passed us in his car, and although he recognized us with a wave, he did not stop to offer us a ride.”

Both girls were enrolled in Central High School, Amelia as a junior and Muriel as a freshman. Amy wrote her brother Mark, “They [the girls] are both in the High School, taking the teachers course and Millie [Amelia] hopes to finish next year.”

According to the Minnesota Historical Society (“Amelia Earhart Found in St. Paul! http://discussions.mnhs.org/collections/2010/06/amelia-earhart-found-in-st-paul), a 1932 local newspaper article stated Amelia was a good student: “The record indicates that the woman who flew alone across the Atlantic ocean was more competent as a student of the German language than in other scholarly pursuits, although all her grades for the one year she attended Central were better than average.” The Historical Society’s file also contains a letter listing her grades for the two semesters and a letter from a former Central High librarian, Laurie Johnson: “I remember hearing Miss Dickson and others say that she was an attractive, friendly, red-haired teenager—not at all unlike her friends. Busy and popular…” She also played on the basketball team.

The newspaper article also says she attended St. Clement’s Episcopal Church and sang in the choir as a soprano. According to Butler, “Blocked from every other social outlet, the church provided Amelia with friends and activities: she joined the Altar Guild, was a member of the Junior Auxiliary, and sang in the choir. Each Sunday she and Marion Blodgett, a student a year ahead of her at high school who lived a block away on Osceola Avenue, walked to St. Clements together.” As members of the Altar Guild, they performed all sorts of tasks, whatever was needed, though Amelia apparently was less than assiduous at times: “Marion would remember the times when what Amelia had done had to be redone by someone else. Marion would also remember how much Amelia loved singing in the choir, and that the two of them sometimes giggled so loudly they drew a reprimand.”

While her exterior life appeared good, Amelia’s family life was still in disarray. Two critical events occurred while they were in St. Paul. One night Amelia was packing for her father to go on a trip when she discovered a bottle of liquor in his socks. As she was pouring the liquor into the sink, her father came in. He was “blazing with anger,” says John Burke in Winged Legend. “He approached the girl with his fist raised, but Mrs. Earhart caught his arm and he subsided in abject contrition.” Muriel says, “He nearly hit Amelia, and he had never before done such a thing.”

The girls were not involved in the holiday social events of St. Paul, but looked forward to a Twelfth Night dance at the church. The second critical event occurred when their father was to escort them, but came home very late and drunk. They had planned to meet two boys and have them over to the house afterward for refreshments. Mary Lovell recounts in The Sound of Wings, when Edwin arrived at home, “Muriel…burst into tears and retired to bed. Millie, steely-eyed and square-jawed, removed the Christmas decorations and pointedly cleared away the preparations she had made to entertain the boys.”

Amelia Earhart never drank alcohol. In Muriel’s estimation, “… the hardship that Amelia and I endured as adolescents made an indelible impression upon us and help to explain some of Amelia’s actions and attitudes in her later life.”

Shortly after the 1913-1914 winter, the family packed up again and went to Springfield, Missouri, where a job Edwin was promised never materialized. He returned to St. Paul and eventually moved back to Kansas, while Amy and the girls went to Chicago, where the family had close friends. Amelia graduated from Hyde Park High School in Chicago.

Despite her family woes and short time in Saint Paul, perhaps Amelia Earhart remembered St. Paul with a fondness for her school and church experiences.

March 2014, revised December 2018

A fleeting glimpse of Amelia, before she took flight

A fleeting glimpse of Amelia, before she took flight

Her brief time in St. Paul was fraught with family troubles, but a dear friend and St. Clement’s Church provided some relief.

By Andy Sturdevant (Illustration by Andy Sturdevant)

The winter of 1913-14 was an unhappy time for Amelia Earhart. Seventeen years old and a junior at St. Paul’s Central High School, she was living in a poorly kept rented house with her parents and sister on Fairmount Avenue, between Victoria and Avon in the Summit Hill neighborhood.

A bright, unconventional, and talented teenager, her life in St. Paul was just one small part of an unhappy young adulthood. This period fell between a fairly idyllic childhood in Kansas and Iowa (soon to be ruined by her father’s alcoholism), and a brilliant career as an aviator that began only a few years later. But her year in St. Paul is perhaps the worst of it, marked by the usual hallmarks of an unhappy family life: alcoholism, money troubles, parental discord, family infighting, wasted potential.

I’m not sure there’s really much to be gained from retracing the steps of a notable figure through a neighborhood in which they once lived (especially in a case like Earhart’s, where she left no tangible physical legacy behind). Is Dinkytown actually made any more interesting just because Bob Dylan rented an apartment there for a year-and-a-half? Not really. But the exercise has its uses; you notice details you might have overlooked in the course of a regular walk, and you’re put in mind of thinking about a place as someone else might have seen it.

Late winter in the Upper Midwest is so somber, downbeat, and bleak, and the streets so empty and cold, that it seemed an appropriate time to put myself in Amelia Earhart’s shoes, walking the paths between her home, school, and church, which formed the parameters of her unhappy life.

Family troubles aplenty
As I noted, the Earharts lived in St. Paul only for a short time. Amelia’s father, a kindhearted but unreliable alcoholic named Edwin, had lost his job working for the Rock Island Line in Des Moines, Iowa. He’d been able to secure a much lower-paying menial position as clerk at the Great Northern in St. Paul, and in 1913 brought the family north for a fresh start.

Earhart’s mother, Amy, was an Otis, the old-line Boston Brahmin family that had achieved great success all over the East Coast and Midwest. Otis was an old family name in St. Paul; there’s an Otis Avenue, running through a tony part of the city along the river between Summit and St. Anthony avenues. Amy’s Uncle Charles lived here, where he’d been a well-respected judge, library board member, and lawyer. Amy thought her standing as an Otis would provide the financial and social resources the family needed to get back on their feet. In fact, the Otises owned the St. Paul Curling Club, less than two miles north on Selby. That’s exactly the kind of respectable winter social activity that proper young St. Paul people like Amelia would have wanted to join in on.

It didn’t happen that way. Edwin’s drinking and loutish behavior kept Amy’s relatives at a distance, and the family fled St. Paul for the promise of another job in Missouri that ended up not panning out. Amelia would finish her schooling in Chicago, go east for college, and then join her parents in California, where she’d fly for the first time, and begin her spectacular career in earnest.


But back to St. Paul. The house at 825 Fairmount Avenue is formidable. Built in 1890 and two stories plus a large attic with a turret, with five bedrooms, and about 3,300 square feet, it’s not the kind of place you’d expect a struggling family to be able to afford to live. And in fact, they couldn’t afford it — heating the house was far too expensive, so in the winter, Earhart’s family confined themselves to the two rooms they could heat.

Two Heated Rooms
The house had been vacant for two years, in a state of moderate disrepair so soon after it was built, and was not the tidy, beautifully restored house it is today. (And it is beautiful, right down to the perfectly painted and sculpted decorative trim – I wanted to tell the current occupants as much in person, but a locked porch prevented me from knocking on their front door.)

The neighborhood, too, has that cozy feeling that characterizes so many St. Paul neighborhoods. But it’s interesting to imagine how different it must have looked and felt a century ago. The housing stock and commercial nodes are pretty similar to what they would have been like in 1914, so perhaps the physical infrastructure was similar, but everything was only about 20 years old. The trees – those that weren’t wiped out by Dutch Elm, anyway – must have been much more straggly, like the kind you see today lining suburban streets in the most far-flung corners of Maple Grove and Eden Prairie. I imagine it was largely renters at that time, too, workers who, like Edwin, commuted to the warehouses, department stores, offices, and factories of downtown St. Paul.

Giggling in church
The center of Amelia’s social life was at St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, a half-mile north on Portland Avenue. It’s an easy walk, now as then, along Victoria past Grand Avenue. Her best friend at that time, a fellow Central student named Marion Blodgett, lived on Osceola Avenue, one block south. The two were members of the Altar Guild, the Junior Auxiliary, and the choir, so they made the walk to St. Clement’s together quite regularly. “The two of them giggled so loudly” in church, notes one biographer, “they drew a reprimand.”

It was also the site of one of Amelia’s greatest disappointments. Dressed up in their best outfits and eager to go to a Christmas dance in December 1913 to meet some dates, the Earhart sisters awaited their father to return home to escort them, as was the expectation of a father at that time. Of course, Edwin got home hours late, after the party had ended, too drunk to escort them or do much of anything else. It was a turning point in the relationship, and in the family’s fortunes. Soon, Amy would stop putting up with Edwin’s behavior and send the girls to school far away from him.

It would have been a nice walk from Fairmount to St. Clement’s. The church was built in 1895, five years after the Earharts’ house was built. It too is impressive — in the way of the ecclesiastical architecture of that era.

Designed by Cass Gilbert, it conveys a sense of authority and permanence, with very impressive woodwork around the entrances, and a towering steeple easily seen from the surrounding blocks. It looks suited for a wide-open countryside; indeed, it was designed to resemble English country parish churches, with high roof beams and an ornate, rustic lychgate leading to the churchyard. What must it have looked like when it, like everything in the neighborhood around it, was only two decades old? The church itself was named for a mother church in New York City, and so was founded with a sense of history and pedigree that makes it seem older than it is.

At dusk, quiet and cold
The whole neighborhood must have seemed eager to establish itself and eager to become the respectable, stable, and prosperous neighborhood it eventually did become. Did Earhart see that eagerness, that aspirational quality?

I think of the area as she might have seen it, with scrawnier trees, less infill, a little newer and more uncertain. I think of some of those now-stately houses, unoccupied, shabbier, too expensive to heat. Amelia was not completely unhappy during her time here – she wrote in a letter to a friend in Kansas “all the girls here are so nice it’s a joy to be with them don’t you know” – but it was a troubled time in her life. It’s hard to imagine that, if she ever returned, she looked at the place with a large degree of fondness.

But who knows? At dusk, in the winter, a walk through the neighborhood is quiet and cold, but very pleasant. The houses look comfortable. Maybe Earhart would have remembered the friendships and camaraderie in the neighborhood’s street corners and churches and schools. Or maybe she’d consider the obstacles placed before her there that she eventually overcame.

It’s impossible to say, walking through it today. It’s only possible to venture guesses about the area, its history and infrastructure and surroundings, from the perspective of a bright teenage girl who’d eventually become one of the most famous people in the world.

Most of the biographical information here is from Susan Butler’s “East to the Dawn: The Life of Amelia Earhart” (1997).

Amelia Earhart Found in St. Paul!

Actually what happened to Amelia Earhart when she disappeared over the Pacific Ocean has never been solved, but some documents about Amelia Earhart were found in the records of the St. Paul school district. Amelia Earhart attended Central High School as a junior during the 1913-1914 school year, and her family attended St. Clements Episcopal Church where she sang in the choir. The documents include correspondence and memoranda (dated 1955-1956) about Amelia Earhart regarding a book the author, Jack Pitman, was writing about the world-famous aviator. Also donated were newspaper clippings (dated in the 1930s) primarily about Earhart’s aviation career.

Featured here is a memo written by Central High School librarian, Laurie C. Johnson, describing Amelia as “an attractive, friendly, red-haired teenager-not at all unlike her friends”. Also, a newspaper clipping with a story about Amelia’s brief residence in St. Paul, along with a photograph of Amelia in the St. Clement’s church choir.

First Owner: John H Healey

This Queen Anne home features a picturesque and complex facade with a centrally located polygonal dormer with a conical cap and a two-story bay window with stained glass transoms. The date of construction, according to the building permit, was 1892. Ramsey County property tax records list the construction date as 1890. The original construction cost was $7,000. Many of the surrounding houses were built several years later.

John H. Healey was the original owner. In 1893 Healey was employed in real estate, and by 1895 he was a traveling agent.

The 1915 Polk Directory for Saint Paul lists the occupant of this house as Edwin S. Earhart, an attorney. Earhart was the father of famous aviator Amelia Earhart. Amelia Earhart attended nearby Central High School for one year.