Welcome to the dining room.

The fireplace before you is Empress Green Italian marble, and this room is the most luxurious room in Cotton Mansion. This fireplace anchors the room, but your eyes are quickly drawn in all directions to all the detail that exists in this room. Almost every inch of the walls and ceiling is custom detail, original to 1908.

We have flame mahogany. We have Italian Renaissance Corinthian columns, dentil details, and a custom plaster coffered ceiling that highlights the subtle textures of the tapestry, which is also original. In the evenings, it really sets off a glow.

The dining table, chairs, and matching mahogany sideboard buffets are all also original. The table’s five feet across and dramatically expands from a small five-foot circle to almost 14 feet long, able to seat a full company of people. This table works so well and fits this room so well. It’s one of those pieces of furniture that’s just stayed and survived for 120 years.

In the off-season, you might find this table down to its five-foot circle up in the foyer under a vase, but in the primary season we move it into the dining room, put the leaves in, and allow it to seat a full complement of people for dinner.

Notice the cotton blossoms on the back of the green chairs that match this table and match this room. This set of dining chairs is also original to the home in 1908, constructed with this table.

If you look to the window in the living room, it’s 56 feet from this fireplace to the front wall. It gives you an idea of how large this home is. It was definitely designed to inspire or for people to gather in, and is all things Italian Renaissance.

Fun fact: the early 1900s is a unique period of technological advancement in the world’s luxury homes. At the time, many things were experimented with. An interesting example is this home has over 200 light fixtures but very few outlets. This room actually did not have a single outlet until a couple of years ago, when we put one underneath the buffet for the coffee maker.

Interestingly enough, the first car that the Cottons owned was an electric car. It was a 1906 Baker Electric horseless carriage. The first car that the family had at Glensheen was also an electric car. Electricity was really new. It was really interesting, but it wasn’t really quite well harnessed just then. It also wasn’t totally reliable.

So this room didn’t have any outlets. Most rooms maybe had one outlet. There weren’t a lot of things to plug in yet, but they really liked light fixtures. And there are sconces and light fixtures all over everywhere in these early homes.

One interesting thing that the Cotton family had installed really early was an internal vacuum system that actually existed. So if you look towards the living room and you look under the credenza to the left of the front window in the living room, you’ll spy a bright silver little outlet coming out of the baseboard. That’s actually the central vacuum outlet.

It doesn’t work anymore. And most of those central vacuum connections are in the servants’ side of the house. But there are a handful throughout the house, and it had actually about 15 central vacuum outlets all run down through the concrete to this big, giant vacuum room next to the boiler room. Interesting for a 1908 home that barely had outlets to plug in things that wouldn’t exist for another 30 or 40 years, but yet had a central vacuum.

One of the other interesting features of Cotton Mansion was a thermal siphon system. It actually took a couple of years of research to rediscover what this thing was. So there’s three pipes that go to every plumbing fixture, and one of them is extra large. We couldn’t figure out why that was, and what it ended up being was a way of using fluid dynamics and thermodynamics to take heated water from the hot-water tank, the hot-water heater, and naturally have it gravitationally flow through the house through the larger pipe and then fall back through the smaller pipe, so that there’s on-demand hot water at every sink and fixture in the house, all the way up to the third floor.

It’d be a long way from the basement to the third floor for hot water to get there, and so they’d actually solved that without pumps or electricity, original to 1908.

Interesting time. Only 8% of the homes in 1906, when Cotton Mansion construction began, had internal electricity. Both the Edison Electric Company and the Great Northern Electric Company actually opened their big power stations between 1906 and 1908, so it was really new.

And homes built in this quick window in the nineteen-aughts all had their electricity run, for the most part, in gas piping. It was a backup, so that if the electricity thing didn’t really work out and wasn’t really consistent, you could quickly pull the wires out and revert back to gas lamps. Glensheen is also wired this way.

One of the interesting through lines that I think is accurate to Cotton Mansion is this interesting early history of electricity. If this building were built only a few years earlier, it’d probably have very little electricity in it and may not have survived the tough years in Duluth’s history from the 1940s to the 1980s.

Transitively, if it was built a few years later, it may have survived better as an apartment building and still be an apartment building today. I think an interesting piece of why Cotton Mansion exists just as it is today is because it had enough electricity to function. It didn’t have the ideal amount to be perfect for an apartment building or a modern home.

It took a little bit of love to reimagine it and rework it, and it gives us what we have today with all these beautiful sconces, all this beautiful woodwork, and the open sightlines of a home that was built for indoor lighting but not built for modern conveniences just yet.

To continue the tour, please head toward the door in the corner between the buffets. Go down the stairs to the lower landing for the next stop on the self-guided audio tour. You’ll find the QR code for the lower landing audio guide next to the wine cellar.