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Dec 17, 2007 7:28 am US/Central
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Finding Minnesota: The American Swedish Institute
MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) ―
Minnesota's Nordic roots are firmly planted along Park Avenue in Minneapolis, where people can find an incredible turn of the century mansion keeping Swedish-American culture alive.
Families like the Dayton's, Washburn's, Crosby's and Pillsbury's built beautiful and luxurious homes along Park, just a stone's throw from their downtown businesses.
They built fortunes from milling and merchandise and their homes showed it. However, of all the mansions to rise along the avenue, none was as impressive and elegant as the home of a rag to riches newspaper man by the name of Swan Turnblad.
"He started in the basement sweeping floors," said says Marc Johnson, who now oversees the mansion that Turnblad built. About to celebrate 100 years since its completion, the mansion at 26th and Park is better known as the American Swedish Institute.
Turnblad would eventually come to own the nation's largest newspaper for Swedish immigrants.
"The Swenska Americanska Posten, Swedish American newspaper," said Johnson. In its heyday, it had a circulation of around 50,000 subscribers.
He used his newspaper fortune to build an 8,000 square foot mansion for his wife Christina and daughter Lillian, but this was more than most.
"Of course, every mansion had a music room," Johnson adds. "But this one was elegantly decorated with these wonderful hand carvings and plasterwork as well."
Turnblad enlisted the help of old-world woodcarvers, direct from Sweden. Each room has ornate mahogany carvings of cherubs, vines and crests adorning the walls. It was painstaking work for the artisans who spend four years inside the home.
Above the landing at the top of the second floor grand staircase is a massive stained glass window, depicting Swedish paupers handing over their money to the Danish King.
"It's been up for 100 years, we haven't touched it, just as when it went in 1908," said Johnson.
The scene depicts a famous Swedish painting, "and I'm told that if you go back to town of Visby, it looks very much like it does there," Johnson explains.
Among the many unique furnishings in the mansion are eleven ceramic stove fireplaces, known as kakelugnars. Though built for heat, the stoves were never fired. That's because Turnblad built his mansion complete with steam heat, and wired for electricity. There's a different kakelugnar in every room, each one more elegant and colorful than the last.
After Turnblad's wife, Christina, died in 1929, he and his daughter moved across the street and turned the home into a museum. He created the American Swedish Institute as a place to preserve Swedish customs and culture.
Barbara Peterson Burwell was among the many guests touring the mansion on this day, and says she's been coming here since a child. She smiles thinking back to her earliest impressions of the great room.
"Thinking about fairy princesses who lived here and the beauty of it, so well taken care of and it's a treasure," said Peterson Burwell, a frequent visitor.
Treasured rooms joyfully decorated in the holiday traditions of five Nordic countries. Each one full of greenery, glass and wandering guests in this mansion built by a hard working Swede.
(© MMVIII, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)