A Pinnacled Mansion

A Pinnacled Mansion

The Charles Dickerman House featured a gable unlike any other in St. Paul

Charles Dickerman House, 1936; by this time it had probably been subdivided into apartments (Minn. Hist. Soc.)

Among the many lost mansions in St. Paul, one of the most curious was built in 1887 by Charles E. Dickerman, a wealthy real estate investor who apparently had a taste for the dramatic when it came to architecture.

The 21-room mansion was at 183 Marshall Ave. (known then as Nelson Ave.), about where it intersects John Ireland Blvd. today near the campus of Saint Paul College. The home overlooked Summit Park, a small triangle of land once surrounded by mansions, including the gigantic Norman Kittson House that was later razed to make way for the St. Paul Cathedral.

The Dickerson House (center), looking across Summit Park from Norman Kittson’s mansion, ca. 1890 (Minn. Hist. Soc.)

Wildly eclectic, Dickerson’s brick-veneered mansion was in most respects a typical Victorian extravaganza, complete with a round tower capped by a tall conic roof, an entry porch supported by bundled columns, an arched port cochere, at least three ornate chimneys and a busy roofline decorated with iron cresting.

The mansion's pinnacled gable

But the mansion also came with one unusual feature—a pinnacled front gable unlike anything else I’ve ever seen in the Twin Cities. The three Gothic-inspired pinnacles were in turn connected by a picket fence of smaller vertical elements, while on either side a pair of rocketlike turrets further enhanced the picturesque proceedings. The pinnacles rose above a pair of elaborate balconies, one stacked atop the other, both supported by massive carved consoles derived from classical architecture.

What prompted thus unusual design is anyone’s guess, but fancy Victorian architecture was all about putting on a show, and Dickerman may simply have wanted a home that would stand out a bit from the usual crowd.

I’ve found no interior photos of the mansion, but an 1887 article in the Pioneer Press states that the home was elaborately finished, its major rooms paneled in oak, cherry, baywood, gumwood and redwood, all “richly carved after special designs.”

The mansion was designed by Augustus Gauger (1852-1929), an architect who enjoyed a long career in St. Paul. Born in Germany, Gauger arrived in the United States as a child and began his working life as a carpenter in Wisconsin before moving on to Chicago. He picked up architectural knowledge along the way, and in 1875, at age 23, he moved to St. Paul. There, he hired on as a draftsman for one of the city’s pioneer architects, Edward P. Bassford. (One source attributes the Dickerman mansion to Bassford but it looks much more like the work of Gauger, who favored heavily ornamented designs.)

Augustus Gauger

Gauger was clearly a go-getter, and by 1878 he’d established his own architectural firm in St. Paul, where the great building boom of the 1880s would assure him plenty of work. He went on to design numerous homes and mansions in St. Paul, including several on Summit Ave., as well as churches, schools and commercial buildings. He eventually developed a nationwide practice and his firm is said to have designed county courthouses in 14 states.

Dickerman was also an interesting character. Born in Ohio in 1834, he moved to Decorah, IA in 1855 and soon became involved in a variety of business enterprises. By 1870, he was investing in real estate in St. Paul, and he and his family finally moved to the city in 1888 after the new mansion was completed. Dickerman had large holdings elsewhere around the country, including property in the Dakotas, Montana and Florida, where he maintained a winter home.

City directories indicate that Dickerman lived in the mansion until his death in 1905 after undergoing what was supposed to have a “minor operation” at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Paul. His wife, Elizabeth, with whom he had five children, died just four days later. At some point after his death, the home was subdivided into at least five apartments, the fate of many old mansions built during the Victorian era.

The Dickerman House, 1953, two years before it was razed (Ram. Cty. Hist. Soc.)

By the early 1950s, as work began on the expansive new State Capitol Mall, the mansion and a number of old houses and apartments nearby stood in the way of plans for what would become John Ireland Blvd. Although the mansion looks to have been in decent shape, its exterior largely intact, it couldn’t survive the push for redevelopment. The state acquired the mansion via condemnation and demolished it in 1955. 

By the time John Ireland Blvd. was completed in the 1960s, all the old homes around Summit Park had been demolished. The park, home to a Soldiers and Sailors Memorial erected in 1903, managed to survive in reconfigured form, but it’s now all that remains of a lost neighborhood.

Although Dickerson’s strange and splendid mansion is long gone, the family name lives on in Dickerman Park, a 2.5-acre strip of land along the north side of University Ave. between Fairview Ave. and Aldine St. Dickerman’s family donated the narrow strip of land to the city in 1910.  Things sometimes move slowly in St. Paul, however, and it wasn’t until 2017 that the land was finally developed into a park.