Glensheen: The Congdon Mansion and Its Dark Chapter
Near Duluth, Minnesota
Chester Congdon made his fortune in Northern Minnesota iron ore and built his family a thirty-nine-room Jacobean mansion on the shore of Lake Superior in Duluth. Glensheen was completed in nineteen oh eight on twenty-two acres, with formal gardens, a carriage house, and a boathouse. It was, by any measure, one of the grandest private homes in Minnesota.
On the morning of June twenty-seventh, nineteen seventy-seven, police found Chester's daughter Elisabeth, eighty-three years old and the last surviving child of the original family, smothered in her bedroom. Her night nurse, Velma Pietila, had been struck with a brass candlestick and was found dead on the grand staircase. Investigators quickly focused on Marjorie's husband, Roger Caldwell. He was convicted of both murders and sentenced to two life terms. The conviction was overturned on appeal in nineteen eighty-two and he later pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter. Marjorie herself was acquitted of conspiracy charges. The University of Minnesota acquired Glensheen and now operates it as one of Minnesota's most visited historic sites, where the house's beauty and its dark chapter are both part of the tour.
