History of the James Mulvey Inn

James MulveyMiranda Mulvey

The James Mulvey Inn was named after the builder of our home, James A. Mulvey.  James Mulvey came to the United States from Cranbrook, in Kent County, England.  His father was a cobbler, and he had two brothers.  The house their family rented still stands on the main street of this charming village.  Though his family stayed in England, James left home for the States at the tender age of 13.

Your Innkeeper standing in front of the Mulvey home in Cranbrook, Kent, UK

Mulvey was an English immigrant of Irish descent who came to this country in the decade of the 1850’s when the population of the state of Minnesota would go from 7,000 non-native people to 150,000 in population.  Transportation in middle America in those days would have been mostly by riverway.  Overland traffic would have been extremely difficult, so Mulvey joined a host of other immigrants in establishing a new life in Minnesota.  Stillwater was strategically placed at the end of several riverways and became the capital of the Minnesota territory, and the Ellis Island of the Upper Midwest. 

Mulvey got caught up in the Civil War mania that would grip the country.  He joined the Minnesota infantry on the side of the Union forces and was first sent off to a Dakota/Sioux uprising in South Dakota, and later on to the Civil War fronts in Georgia.  He was later decorated and recognized as a military hero, and his name is inscribed on the Civil War Infantryman Bronze, which is on the courthouse lawn just off of Third Street on your way downtown.  Legends say that Mulvey brought black walnuts back with him from the war and planted them on his newly-acquired property in the Holcomb's Addition of Stillwater.  Though we cannot verify the historicity of this story, there are still several black walnut trees on the property and perhaps the oldest of the trees expired and came to earth with a crash in 1999.  The wedding conservatory in the center of the lawn is built on the pad where the old tree fell.

You might want to stroll around the property and look at some of the interesting trees that were planted on this property - a gingko tree that loses all of its leaves on the same night in the Fall - and a huge, massive oak tree on the east border of the property which has the original iron fence of Mr. Mulvey's property growing right through the center of it. 

Mulvey would soon pursue the second great industry in Stillwater history (after immigration), the lumber industry.  With all the expansion of immigration in Minnesota and the upper Midwest and the building of farms and farmsteads and homesteads and towns, lumber was a premium product and there was a tremendous amount of money to be made in this business.  Stillwater was ideally located at the base of the largest white pine stand the world has ever seen, which extended on both sides of the St. Croix River north of Stillwater on up into upper Wisconsin and upper Michigan.  Mulvey's business would become one of the seven most successful lumber brokering businesses in the Stillwater area.  His crews would move out into the forests, cutting lumber in the winter and then hauling out logs in the spring, floating them down the St. Croix River as rafts, and cutting them in one of the many mills on the shores of the town.  In an antique shop, we found an invoice signed by Mr. Mulvey for the 1883 purchase of a small lumber company from a Swede, listing the picks and rafts and other equipment of logging that were included in the sale for a total price of $550 - a fairly handsome sum in that day.

Mulvey began building his house in the 1870s, completing it in 1878.  It was on a property of something over an acre and a quarter - five city lots - in the Holcomb's Addition.  Holcomb was a landowner and the Holcomb's Addition was a new family-oriented community on the extremities of the city of Stillwater.  You must remember that at this time, lumber brought in hundreds of single men who worked in the woods and came to town to patronize the boarding houses or the brothels or saloons, of which there were legion in Stillwater.  So any conservative Presbyterian family man, like Mr. Mulvey was, would look for some area outside the busy central city, and Holcomb was one of those areas.  You can actually drive down Churchill Street and see that every three or four houses is a large Victorian.  Later landowners would sell off their large lots and in the '20s, '30s, and '40s small homes continued to be built along Churchill Street.  The road was covered with ground limestone surface with wooden boardwalks on both sides.  The picture above shows the Mulveys’ horse and buggy parked in front of the house, highlighting the vintage beauty of these housing sites in early Stillwater.  It is also clear from the picture that the spectacular white pines that adorn our property are virgin pines, some of the oldest in Stillwater.  They watched the Mulveys’ activities even as they watch ours.

The first addition of Mulveys’ house was everything from the south wall of the dining room over to the porch on Churchill Street.  The house was a modest Italianate Victorian house.  Italianate-style Victorian houses were popular in the 1870s in Stillwater.  They were fairly easy to build one or two stories with wide eaves and corbels and bay windows and large porches to decorate the square or rectangular structures.  This house is often photographed as a particularly charming example of an Italianate Victorian house.  They were also easy to add onto, and Mulvey would add on the formal dining room, a food preparation area or kitchen, and then a summer porch or sleeping porch to which has been added an innkeeper's quarters these days.

Two other things are interesting about Mr. Mulvey's house.  One is the stone carriage house, which is a substantial full stone building directly north of the Main House, probably built somewhere around 1890 but later remodeled into a livable residence on three floors.  The Carriage House became a separate legal property from the main house over the years.  The other significant change to the property came just after the turn of the century when Mulvey would renovate in the Arts and Crafts style the entire main floor of the Main House.  The Arts and Crafts movement was an aesthetic as well as a social movement which was reacting strongly to child labor abuse and other downsides of industrialization that were happening in America.  Certain poets and artists were making a strong call to return to quality handmade goods of beauty for the home.  People joined in guilds in order to produce functional and beautiful items out of pottery, copper, and wood and this created an entirely new decorating style that clearly intrigued Mulvey.  Today we call this style Craftsman, Stickley, or Mission style.  He would remove the pocket doors that divided the double parlor into two sections and put in an art tile fireplace.  When many of his lumber baron friends were rebuilding houses into large Queen Ann-style mansions, Mulvey kept his house but gave it a renovation that perhaps would have cost the price of a small house.  This dining room is a clear and lovely example of an Arts and Crafts interior.  There were originally hand-painted sinuous flowers on the walls but these were damaged and removed in the 1950s.  They were replaced with this Arts and Crafts embossed wallcovering made in England, called Lincrusta.

When lumber ran out in the St. Croix Valley, Mulvey would continue to log in the Hinckley and Aitkin areas nearly until his death in 1913.  His family members would occupy the house until the early 1950s.

It is always kind to a house to have its original family live long in the house.  They tend to leave it like it originally was.  As a matter of fact, his two unmarried daughters lived together in kind of an old-world rich style, being served by a maid whose name was Gertrude from her teenage years well into her retirement years.  Jessie was the last Mulvey to live here and died in 1952.  Jessie and Edna never had to work a regular job as their father's estate took care of them, though they were active in social circles.  The Mulvey family was instrumental in saving the Lowell Inn which, during the Depression, was experiencing tremendous financial difficulties.  The Mulveys were active in the banking sector of Stillwater life.  Some of the neighbors who remembered Edna and Jessie Mulvey and Gertrude recall certain memories.  They recall a large black Pierce-Arrow car parked in the turn-about driveway.  They remember a buzzer with a wire and an annoying buzz that went from the center of the dining room table to the maid's quarters above the dining room so that the sisters could alert Gertrude to whatever the needs were when they had their friends for tea.  They told us that this home was kind of a social services center during the Depression, a place where people could come for some financial help if they were in significant need.  Edna and Jessie might give them a stern lesson in financial management but they would also get some help.  They remember Gertrude as a very religious woman who prayed for the children when they were sick and was adored by all of the neighbors. 

When Jessie died, the home was willed to one of the Mulvey family members with the hope that it would remain a family treasure.  However, it was sold some two years later and this led to significant family strife and disagreement that was most difficult for the family.  We have had the Mulveys occasionally revisit the Inn and enjoy seeing the home that meant so much to its family and history.