Hartley House (1915)

The 1915 Hartley House photographed ca. 1970 by Guilford G. Hartley. [Image: Guilford G. Hartley]

3800 E. Superior Street | Architect: Bertram Goodhue | Built: 1915 | Extant

As long as he had renowned architect Bertram Goodhue working on three commissions for Duluth—St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the Kitchi Gammi Club, and Hartley’s own office building—it wasn’t a stretch for Guilford Hartley and his wife Carrie to tap Goodhue again to design a wedding present for their eldest son Cavour and his fiancé ,Carolyn Munger: a grand home across Superior Street from one of Cavour’s favorite haunts, the Northland Country Club.

Born in 1890, Cavour attended Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, before moving on to Yale Law School where his classmates called him “Cub.” His extracurricular activities included serving as commodore of the Corinthian Yacht Club and membership in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity as well as the notorious secret society Skull and Bones. Two years younger than her husband, Hurley, Wisconsin, native Carolyn Warmington Munger studied piano in Paris under Harold Bauer before marrying Cavour. The year the couple married, Cavour took over as president and manager of the Hartley Company, which oversaw the family’s mining interests, and organized the Cavour Hartley Company, a real estate concern.

He also served in the military, patrolling the Mexican border as a National Guardsmen in 1916; he joined the army during World War I and the navy in World War II. Hartley, who enjoyed golf, curling, trapshooting, fishing, and hunting, did plenty of playing outdoors. Caroloyn, meanwhile spent much time playing indoors as a member of Duluth’s Matinee Musicale and the Duluth Symphony Orchestra’s piano soloist. Along the way the Hartleys had four sons. Carolyn died in 1983 and Cavour three years later.

Goodhue’s design for the Hartley house adapted the English Gothic Revival style he had employed in with his previous Duluth buildings, facing the two-and-a-half-story home in red brick and topping it with a high-pitched hipped roof covered in slate and pierced on both the back and sides with flat-roof dormers. The front façade features a gable dressed in barge board as well as a round-arch limestone entrance; limestone is also used in the mullions of the house’s window casings. Inside the nearly seven-thousand-square-foot house Goodhue employed molded plaster ceilings and quarter-sawn oak floors in random widths. The interior is outfitted with seven bedrooms, six bathrooms, and at least six fireplaces. The house sits on more than three acres of property that was landscaped by Frederick L. Olmsted Jr., whose father designed New York’s Central Park.