Welcome to the Coachman Suite. This is a special feature on the self-guided audio tour, just for those guests who are staying in the Coachman Suite and can’t get enough local Duluth history.

The Cotton Mansion carriage house is an exceptional space and held the carriages and early automobiles of the Cotton family. Also, traditionally in a turn-of-the-century mansion, the carriage house is where the male staff lived.

Female staff lived in the main house, often on the third floor, as it was in Cotton Mansion and many other turn-of-the-century mansions. The Cotton family had two male staff members who lived in the carriage house: a chef and a chauffeur, or coachman.

We are in the Congdon neighborhood, which was the neighborhood of turn-of-the-century mansions, most built between 1900 and 1912.

This time period was vastly dominated by horse and carriage, but because it was an affluent neighborhood, it was designed as a horseless carriage neighborhood.

There was a large stable a few blocks down the road on Fourth and 26th, where Holy Rosary’s parking lot is today. This meant that the horses didn’t need to be lodged right behind the mansions in the carriage houses, making the neighborhood smell a lot better.

A coachman of the era would go to the stable, fetch the horse, bring it back, and rig it up. They would probably pull it under the carport, or porte-cochere, at the Cotton Mansion and pick up the family for their travel for the day.

This time period was interesting, and that horse-and-buggy time period was about to change. In 1906, when the Cottons started construction on Cotton Mansion, Mr. Cotton also bought his very first automobile. It was a 1906 Baker electric carriage. It was very much still a horseless carriage. It was an electric carriage. It was about ten feet long, went about 20 miles an hour, and, interestingly, was completely electric.

If you’re interested in more info about Cotton’s early automobile history, there are pictures of these cars in the stairwell on the third floor in the main house.

This 1906 Baker electric car was one of the very first horseless carriages, or automobiles, in Duluth. Chester Congdon, just down the street at Glensheen, also owned one of these electric autos.

Cotton’s next car was the 1908 H.H. Franklin Touring Car, which was a seven-passenger, open-top, very early Brass Era car.

They call the era before the Model T the Brass Era. It’s partially because every car was custom-built and all of the fittings on them were solid brass.

By the mid-1910s, right before World War One, Henry Ford would invent the Model T and the assembly-line process, bringing the price down and bringing cars to the masses, and changing the automobile industry and our history with automobiles.

But in 1908, Joseph Cotton would buy the 1908 H.H. Franklin Touring Car, and that year it was one of 42 cars in Duluth. Cars were so unique that every time someone bought one, it made the paper.

Imagine trying to design your garage in 1908. Would you build it for your horse and carriage, or would you build it for this brand-new automobile thing?

Cotton Mansion and this carriage house were built at the cusp of the new automobile era. These early cars, including Cotton Mansion’s Franklin Touring Car, also called the Phaeton, were all open-top, which likely meant they were only used in the fair months of the year with Duluth’s climate.

Indeed, they struggled with what to build and actually had very different carriage-house designs made that were never built. There were plans for a much larger carriage house with an internal turntable that was never built. Those plans are hung in the hallway just outside of the Coachman Suite.

The automobiles would keep coming. In 1910, Mr. Cotton bought a new 1910 Franklin Type D limousine, which was Duluth’s very first fully enclosed automobile.

This wasn’t a stretched, long vehicle like we think of today when we think of limousines. It was actually just a small four-seater, but it was a limo simply because it was fully enclosed.

Such an interesting time in automobile history.

There’s also a picture of this 1910 Franklin Type D limousine on the stairwell to the third floor in the main house.

If you’d like to learn more about the Cotton Mansion, the Cotton family, and early-1900s Duluth history, consider following the main self-guided audio tour. There are 12 stops that take you from top to bottom through the main house and all the common rooms, and it starts with a QR code on the console in the main-floor foyer.