Archive For July 28, 2018
101 Gunderson Blvd. Kenyon, MN
The Martin T. Gunderson house is a spectacularly maintained house museum that currently serves as the location of the Kenyon Area Historical Society. The KAHS loves and cares for this gem. House tours are scheduled regularly so the house is accessible to the public. Trust me, if you are within 100 miles of Kenyon, you owe it to yourself to visit this home, and when you do, please support the KAHS. This Barber design borrows the corner box bay and tower combination from his earlier published design no. 128, seen in the revised edition of “The Cottage Souvenir No. 2”. This house began to appear in Barber’s post-fire publications like the “Modern Dwellings” series of pattern books.
606 First Street SE Little Falls, MN
Barney & Josephine Burton built a smaller version of Barber’s design 01, as published in the third edition of the “Modern Dwellings” series of pattern books. This classic colonial home currently serves as the Welcome Center for the Little Falls Convention & Visitors Bureau, so it should be generally accessible to the public. If so, I would love for someone local to shoot some interior photos of this home for me, so I can add the photos to this post. If you are willing to help me out in this regard, please comment below. Mr. Burton was the proprietor of a clothing and dry goods store, making him a very typical (rising middle class) client of George Barber.
Lyle, Minnesota
Barber published the Dr. Willis F. Cobb residence in the August number of the 1898 edition of his American Homes magazine. And because Lyle Minnesota is so small and online resources are so scarce, I cannot determine what happened to this home, or where exactly, it was located. I suspect that it was lost fairly early in its history because there is precious little, online, about this home or the Cobb family. Anyway, as far as I am concerned, this home is MIA, until I can track it down somehow. While I would love to uncover some additional old or historic photos of it, I would especially like to uncover where exactly, it was located when it existed. Any help along these lines would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.