Washburn-Fair Oaks: Where the Milling Millions Lived
Near Minneapolis St Paul, Minnesota
The Washburn-Fair Oaks district was Minneapolis's Gold Coast, built in the eighteen eighties when the men who turned wheat into flour turned their profits into mansions. The grandest belonged to William Drew Washburn, a senator whose forty-room home sat on two full blocks of landscaped grounds. His brother Cadwallader had founded the Washburn-Crosby mill that later became General Mills.
When William died in nineteen twelve, he left the estate to the city. The park board found it too expensive to maintain and demolished the mansion in nineteen twenty-four. The surrounding houses survived, a streetscape of Queen Anne, Romanesque, and Colonial Revival homes built by the architects who shaped Victorian Minneapolis.
The district was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight.
