Outside of Sweden there is no finer collection of decorative porcelainized stoves for heating the front parlors than the eleven in the sumptuous French chateau that Swan J. Turnblad built on Park Avenue in Minneapolis. Neither is there a finer assortment of carved African mahoganies, European furniture and Swedish rugs of Oriental designs. When Minnesota was still a wilderness, mustering youths to fight the Confederates at Bull Run. a son was born to the Manson family in the Province ot Smaland, Sweden. The Mansons weer tanners, living in poverty and endless toil. When they heard of the great potential wealth of Minnesota’s farmland they migrated there, taking along the boy, Sven who then was eight years old. Sven enjoyed handling printing presses more than plows as he grew up at Vasa, Minnesota. Before he graduated from Vasa High School he printed a book on arithmetic that the principal had written. He also changed his name to Swan J. Turnblad. At nineteen he moved to Minneapolis to work for the old Svenska Amerikanska Posten, which was in financial trouble. He became the owner of the faltering paper and made it the largest Swedish language publication in America. Mr. Turnblad created a sensation in Minneapolis in 1900 by driving through the Nicollet Avenue shopping district in a Waverly Electric, the first vehicle of its kind to be seen there. Women scurried for safety and men reined in their horses as Mr. Turnblad clanged the gong of the horseless carriage and cut a path through the crowds.
He created another sensation in 1907 when he completed his $1,500,000 French chateau of thirty-three rooms at Twenty-sixth Street and Park Avenue, among the lesser mansions that millionaire millers and bankers were building. The massive three-story Turnblad structure, with towers, turrets, terraces and a high wrought-iron fence, was one of the finest and most luxuriously furnished in the Northwest. Mr. Turnblad, his wife and their young daughter Lillian did not find, how ever, that the joy of living increased in step with the rise in their standard of living. Managing the servants in the mansion was like commanding a small army. The rooms were far larger and more numerous than the family of three either needed or wanted. And the cost of maintaining the property Mr. Turnblad considered excessive. So the family traveled extensively rather than remain in the mansion. When they were home the three lived just on the second floor, and finally they moved to an apartment across the street, from which they could see the chateau and not be faced by all the annoyances of operating it.
In 1929. after his wife’s death, Mr. Turnblad gave the mansion to the Ameri can Swedish Institute, which he had founded. The institute now maintains the property as one of the cultural centers of the Northwest. It is visited by 25,000 persons a year, which would please Mr. Turnblad. Just before his death in 1933 he said: “It has been my lifelong ambition to foster and preserve Swedish culture in America. I hold dear many things that are Swedish, although 1 am an American now, and it seems to me to be desirable for both countries if products of Swedish culture are shown here.”
The grand entrance hall is paneled in African mahogany and has ornate carvings that craftsmen worked on for seven years. Flanking the staircase are two mahogany griffins — half lion and half eagle, as used in Greek and Roman art. On either side of a fireplace. Viking figures support pedestals for candelabra. One of the last surviving craftsmen who worked on the carvings was Swiss- born Ulrich Steiner. He fell so deeply in love with the creations that he kept re turning for fifty years to see them again and again. Son of a wood carver, Ulrich started in the craft as a boy and continued in it after migrating to Minnesota. The same was true of many of the craftsmen Mr. Turnblad hired. All the rugs in the house are seamless carpets of Swedish wool, woven in Sweden, with one exception. The big rug covering the floor of the grand hall was made in Austria, since Sweden at that time had no looms large enough for it. The rugs have different Oriental patterns. The dining room has a table for twenty-four persons and massive chairs that roll on ball bearings. Among the dinner guests there have been former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Dag Hammarskjold, Edgar Bergen, Chief Justice Earl Warren and members of the royal family of Sweden. In eleven of the elegantly furnished rooms are the porcelainized stoves, known as kakehtgnar. The Swedes used them instead of fireplaces to heat houses and they are as decorative as big chests of drawers. White-birch logs were the common fuel. One loading of the logs would keep a stove hot for thirty hours and warm an entire room. Each stove had its own flue to the roof. Although cen tral heating systems became common in Sweden and Minnesota after 1910, the kakelugnar continued to be used in homes as curiosities in the manner that New Englanders used cobblers’ benches.
The kakelugnar were first used in Europe in the seventeenth century, chiefly by aristocrats with large castles but later by middle-class families. Scandinavians brought a few of the stoves to Colonial America. Benjamin Franklin’s achievements with iron stoves increased the interest in replacing the traditional fireplace as a heating device. Over the years the styles of the kakelugnar reflected the fashions in decorations. When tastes switched to Chinese, French or German decor, so did the de sign of the stoves. The Turnblad collection indicates the changes in tastes. Some experts feel that those of German influence are too heavy, those of French in fluence too fragile and those that are strictly Swedish are just right. Several of the stoves represent an age of grace in furniture designing that led to the Swedish Modern of todav. The Rorshancl Company, one of Sweden’s most famous ceramics manufacturers, absorbed Marieberg, one of the finest makers of porcelainized stoves. The stoves with the Marieberg insignia are among the most prized by collectors, and Mr. Turnblad acquired several. Researchers report that more than half of the stoves in the Turnblad collection probably were made in the last part of the nineteenth century.
A carving in one of the rooms illustrates a Swedish legend that elves, trolls and other mysterious inhabitants of the forests can lure young maidens from earthly homes into the splendor of an enchanted universe. On the third floor of the mansion is the Turnblads’ ballroom, currently used for displays of Swedish Modern furniture, paintings and other art objects. In the ballroom and adjacent rooms are the furnishings of a century-old Swedish kitchen and 200 gifts donated to the American Swedish Institute by the parishes and municipalities of Viirmland Province, Sweden. The chateau also has a general assembly room, now used for public concerts, lectures, exhibits and motion-picture shows related to Scandinavia, early Minnesota and travel. The library has 12,000 books, many relating to Scandinavia.
-Excerpted from Great American Mansions and their Stories.
by Merrill Folsom
1963