Welcome to the third-floor landing. This is the last stop on the common-area self-guided audio tour. If you’re staying with us, you’ll find many more quick snippets in each of the guest rooms, but we hope you enjoy this tour. We bring you all the way to the third floor to kind of show the last piece of the common area of the Cotton Mansion.

This area was indeed part of the formal house, as it had a formal stairway that came up, and there were two guest rooms up here, along with a guest bathroom. There was an expansive billiards suite for entertaining and recreating. And then there were also the three bedrooms and bathroom for the female servant staff that came up and down the servants’ staircase and were part of the staff that operated the house.

It’s truly an interesting part of the house. The billiards room is the same size as the living room. It is actually quite massive. It was originally on the plans as a billiards room. It has a 20-foot-long warming bench where you can sit and watch as others play, and there was definitely space for many more activities than just pool in there.

In this time in history, this was many years before radio or TV. Really, entertainment was a live thing. It was a physical thing. It was a thing you’d do. You’d gather, you’d have people over, and you would have events. You’d have live music. You’d play games, whether it’s pool or shuffleboard or something like that, or even some kind of organized dancing.

I’m sure that happened quite a bit here as a summer home and as a home that you could entertain in. This house is made for entertaining. So this was the entertainment room.

One of the other interesting pieces is that there weren’t a lot of hotels back then. It was way more common, when you had a prominent guest, to have them over. If you think about it, you weren’t going out to the movies or going to—you might go to a show, but you really weren’t going out to a lot of different entertainment. So you’d have them over.

You’d have them over to your house. You had your own staff to put on dinner and entertain. And so Cotton Mansion is complete with a couple guest rooms right from the very beginning, which we’ve now labeled Roosevelt Room and Vermilion Room.

The Roosevelt Room is the corner guest room and is named Roosevelt because, in 1904, Joseph Cotton introduced Roosevelt at the National Convention. And he had a lovely speech. We have it actually framed in there, and if you have a chance to go in, it’s definitely worth a read.

Clockwise, as you work your way around the third floor and see the Roosevelt Room, the Vermilion Room, the billiards suite, and then all the way to the right, we have one of the first servants’ rooms as the Aquitania Suite.

Joseph Cotton’s family hosted dignitaries, held weddings, and had many events in this home. In fact, that was the primary use from 1916 to 1940, when the family strictly came here for summers after they moved to New York. This was where they went to beat the heat and probably the smell of New York City, and relaxed in Duluth.

Hope you enjoyed the self-guided tour. If you missed any stops along the way, you can always hop on or hop off. Grab a QR code wherever you are and learn a little bit more about the history of Cotton Mansion, early Duluth, and the Industrial Revolution, the time period that this home was built. Take care.