Welcome to the 11th stop in the self-guided audio tour: the third-floor staircase. This staircase is unique in the sense that not very many homes of this era have a formal stairway to the third floor.

The third floor has the billiards room and a couple of guest rooms, along with a couple bathrooms and the servants’ quarters for the in-house staff. A good majority of the third floor was actually part of the formal home from the very beginning, as you’ll see.

The staircase isn’t anything necessarily special, but we’ve used this space to collect a handful of pieces about the interesting history at the time when Cotton Mansion was created, specifically the automobile collection.

Mr. Cotton liked cars, and he was, in fact, one of the first car owners in the city of Duluth. As one might have with a mansion this size, his first car was a 1906 Baker, and it was electric.

Interestingly, Chester Congdon also had a 1906 or 1905 electric car as his first car. These cars were small. You’ll see a picture of it on the wall. They’re quite small, and they would have easily fit through that porte cochère terrace carport underneath there.

In 1909, he would get a Franklin seven-passenger touring car, which was an open-top car. It was one of 42 cars to exist in Duluth at that time. Cars were so interesting and rare, so interesting that they made the front-page paper, as you’ll see here on the wall.

This 1906 electric Baker automobile is really more of a horseless carriage. It didn’t go very fast. It wasn’t very powerful. But you weren’t staring at a horse’s butt the whole time.

Interestingly, in 1908, this car was stolen and crashed on 28th Avenue East and Jefferson Street. It actually went all the way to trial.

The Cottons bought a third car in 1910, so that had been two years after moving into the house and the house being finished. And it was also a Franklin. It was a Landaulet limousine, and it was a fully enclosed car. It was the first limousine of Duluth, per the paper.

These early Franklin cars were really actually something. There’s not very many left today. I think there’s four, and there’s a museum in Wisconsin that has a couple of them. We have a couple pictures here.

What’s really interesting about them is that they have an almost circular engine compartment that has a fan in the front, and it looks almost like a jet engine.

These cars were custom-made, one of a kind, well before the Model T would come along with mass production. They were covered in brass and steel, with wood wheels and leather. There was no plastic back then, so they were heavy. They were shiny, and they were kind of quite something. I’d love to see one today.

They called this era the Brass Era, and that was what they called all of these cars before kind of mass production, where things got a little bit more affordable for the average person and a little bit more easy to produce and a little bit less refinement in the finishes.

The first year of the mass-produced Model T was 1908, and they really wouldn’t proliferate till the mid-teens.

To continue the tour, please continue up the stairs to the third-floor hall. You’ll find a QR code for the third-floor audio guide on the wall to the left of the stairway.