Welcome to the porte cochère side entrance. This is stop six on the self-guided audio tour.

I love the porte cochère entrance in this house. It’s totally unique, and it’s actually got a couple of unique details that you’ll never see anywhere else.

One of the coolest features, if you look out the door and look down the steps of the porte cochère entrance, is that one really big step. There’s a stairway of normal steps to the right, and then there’s that one really big step that’s going to look like a double step at the bottom that’s about six feet wide. That step is actually a carriage step. So it’s really hard on car doors and not ideal for today’s living, but it was the perfect height for stepping out of a carriage.

So if you happen to drive through the porte cochère on your way to Cotton Mansion today, we’re sorry how tight the porte cochère is, but we have a hard time ripping it out, as most have been done in these old homes, because it is so true to the original history of the home.

In most porte cochères or side carport entrances, they’ve been yanked out. They’ve been widened so they fit modern cars today. Well, we luckily have great access off of 23rd Avenue East to the alley and the parking behind the home, so there’s no need to rip this out.

And it is indeed kind of cool. It is a big step. So that’s how you would go down and get in the carriage. And there was a normal flight of stairs for if you were just going down to walk to the sidewalk.

To the rear, looking out the door, you’ll also see the carriage house itself. This is where the carriages were kept, and eventually cars.

You may have heard earlier in the audio tour that the Cottons’ first car was a 1906 electric car, which was right around when they started building the home. It was small, and if you continue the tour up toward the third story, you’ll have an opportunity to see a picture of it.

But it was quite small. The Cottons actually wouldn’t own their first automobile until this home was already complete. Indeed, it’s kind of a tricky time to build a garage. Are you building it for carriages? Are you building it for electric cars? Are you building it for a gas-powered automobile, which they wouldn’t have even owned yet?

In the carriage house, if you make it out there someday, you’ll see on the wall in the stairwell a set of plans for a couple other carriage houses that they never built, because between 1906 and 1908, the world was changing quite rapidly, and the demands for a garage were changing with it.

It was an interesting period. In 1908, when this home was finished, there were only 42 cars in Duluth. The Cottons had one of the first 42, in the 1908 paper. But in just 10 to 15 years later, the horse and buggy would be obsolete. In the 1920s, in Duluth, about 10% of the residents would have an automobile.

In the carriage house, the chauffeur and the chef lived upstairs. One of the common themes in this era was that the male servants would live in the carriage house, and the female staff would live on the third floor of the main house. And so it was the same in Glensheen and in many other homes. Cotton had a total of five live-in staff: a chauffeur, a chef, a seamstress, a maid, and a nanny.

One interesting fact while we’re out here on the porte cochère entrance is that Condon neighborhood, this neighborhood, was actually called a horseless carriage neighborhood. What that meant, simply, was that there were carriages everywhere, because that’s how people got around. But they didn’t have horses. They didn’t keep their horses at home.

There was a common livery stable on 26th Avenue East and Fourth Street, basically where Holy Rosary’s parking lot is today. And if you wanted to go somewhere, you’d have someone go fetch your horse or horses, bring them back to your house and hook up the carriage, pull it up, and get it ready.

Most of these homes in this neighborhood weren’t designed to keep animals, and it also kept the neighborhood smelling a lot better.

To continue our tour, please head back inside and go left through the foyer to the library. You’ll find the QR code for the library audio guide on the mantel.