“House on Virginia Avenue” was printed in the lower
right-hand corner of the drawing of the building’s front façade. Below it was
the architect’s name, “Cass Gilbert.” Virginia was no longer an avenue, but a
street. Nor did the house sit on its original site. It had been moved two
blocks south to make way for the Aberdeen Hotel, built in 1899.
The Aberdeen, once the most posh residential hotel in St.
Paul, was long gone. After WWI, the federal government leased it for use as a
veterans’ hospital. By 1927, it was vacant. Ten years later, a thirty-year-old
waitress, Diane Munson, was found brutally murdered after a second-floor fire.
In 1944, the building was razed.
Though the years had been unkind, the Virginia Street house
still stood. Many of the original shingle-style details had been lost when the
building was moved. Others likely just rotted away. The original interior was
barely recognizable. A slumlord had gotten hold of it during the Depression and
carved it up. The original living room had been converted to two apartments
with back-to-back baths. The staircase to second floor had been reworked and
pedestrianized.
The proud new owner dragged me over to the seller’s house.
I’d seen some pretty cool libraries in my day—public and private—but nothing prepared
me for Mister Earl’s. One wall of his office, floor to ceiling, were shelves
filled with abstracts of title. He found the one for the Virginia Street house.
A notable early owner was Judge Flandrau. Flandrau’s father practiced law with
Aaron Burr. Flandrau served on the Minnesota Territorial Council, Minnesota
Constitutional Convention, and Minnesota territorial and supreme courts. His
real claim to fame occurred after the Sioux Uprising in 1862, when he joined
the Union Army as a captain and raised a force to relieve the siege of New Ulm.
Flandreau (sp), South Dakota is named after him.
The new owner began his years’ long research of the
building. A later tenant of Flandrau was his son, Charles, a writer. An earlier
tenant was Jerusha Sturgis, widow of Civil War General Samuel Sturgis (Sturgis,
South Dakota is named after him). He graduated from the US Military Academy in
the class with McClellan, Reno, Stoneman, “Stonewall” Jackson, and Pickett.
After the war he commanded the infamous 7th Cavalry. He just
happened to be on detached service in St. Louis when his second-in-command met Sitting
Bull and Crazy Horse. One of Sturgis’s sons died at the Little Bighorn. Another
became a general as did his son. It seemed there were a lot of
Civil War generals, as Samuel Gilbert, the father of the building’s architect
was also a general as was his brother, Charles, and his great uncle, Lewis Cass.
Jerusha Sturgis’s granddaughter revisited the Virginia
Street house in her ninth decade, arriving in a chauffeured car. She rattled
off the names of the neighborhood’s children. She noted the changes to the
building, describing the original staircase. She didn’t have any inside
information on the diary found in the attic of a neighbor’s house, a diary
belonging to William Clark, Meriwether Lewis’s second-in-command.
Jerusha’s granddaughter, Eleanor Jerusha Lawler married John
S. Pillsbury. Why do I care? My grandmother, a widow with two children, dated
her son, and my grandmother’s son attended Pillsbury Military Academy. I didn't ask enough questions. All the players are dead. The truth may be out there, as Mulder and Scully claim, but not the answers.
