Brucemore: Three Families, One Estate

The estate at two thousand one hundred sixty Linden Drive Southeast was built between eighteen eighty-four and eighteen eighty-six by Caroline Sinclair, the widow of meatpacking industrialist Thomas Sinclair, whose fortune had made Cedar Rapids one of the largest hog-processing centers in the world. She commissioned a twenty-one-room Queen Anne mansion with a steeply gabled roof, five chimneys, and several turrets, set on twenty-six acres of grounds that included a formal garden, a pond, and an orchard. It was described at the time as the grandest house west of Chicago.

Three families owned Brucemore over the following century, and each left its mark. The Douglases, who made their money in starch processing, added the polish of the Gilded Age and its cultural ambitions. Irene Douglas was an art patron who hired Grant Wood, years before American Gothic made him famous, to decorate a sleeping porch in nineteen twenty-five.

She also installed a Skinner Player Pipe Organ in nineteen twenty-nine, one of only six ever built for residential use by the Skinner Organ Company that remain unaltered in their original location. The instrument still occupies space across three floors of the mansion. The third family, the Halls, added the Grizzly Bar and a Tahitian Room in the nineteen thirties, reflecting the taste for exotica that ran through Depression-era wealth.

When Margaret Hall died in nineteen eighty-one, she bequeathed the entire estate to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. It is the only National Trust site in Iowa. Brucemore opens its grounds for concerts, tours, and garden events through the warmer months, a twenty-six-acre estate that has somehow kept its scale while the city built up around it.