The Warden's House Museum
Near Stillwater, Minnesota
At six hundred two North Main Street stands a handsome two story house that is now a museum open to the public. This is the Warden's House, built in eighteen fifty three as the official residence for the warden of the Minnesota Territorial Prison, whose walls once stood just up the hill in Battle Hollow. For more than sixty years, until the prison closed in nineteen fourteen, thirteen successive wardens and their families lived here, close enough to walk to work at one of the toughest jobs in the state.
The first warden, Francis Delano, was among those who lived here. When the prison shut down and the state no longer needed the house, it might have been lost, but in nineteen forty one the Washington County Historical Society acquired it and opened it as a museum, one of the earliest historic house museums in Minnesota. Inside, the rooms are filled with relics of the lumber era, the pioneer days of Washington County, and the prison itself, including objects connected to the notorious Younger brothers.
It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy four, a quiet limestone survivor of a rougher age.
