Scott House

The Scott residence ca. 1910, photographer unknown. [Image: Linda Eillis]

2125 East 1st Street | Architect: William A. Hunt | b. 1907 | Extant

William Hunt designed this two-and-a-half-story Tudor Revival with multigabled roofs covering an H-shaped footprint. It has two front-projecting bays with steeply pitched gables; the left bay includes an oriole window at the second-floor level, and a double-gabled dormer sits between the bays. Another oriel window rests above the house’s front door, A wing on the western side of the house provides a first-floor sun porch and second-floor veranda. As expected from the style, the first floor is faced with Flemish bond brick trimmed in brownstone while the upper floors are chiefly clad in stucco and false half-timbering. Michigan natives Zar and Francis Scott had been married over thirty years and had four grown children by the time they moved into the house. Scott worked as a surveyor until he joined a Minneapolis lumber firm in 1876. Four years later he and Francis moved to Duluth where he organized Scott & Holsten Lumber Company, which later became the Scott-Graff Lumber Company. Scott was a civic leader as well, serving on the city council, school board, and the Minnesota State Forestry Board, and was instrumental in the creation of Itasca State Park. An advocate of reforestation, his obituary stated that his strongest belief was that “the people of Minnesota should work out some intelligent plan by means of which the forests may be restored and perpetuated.” Francis died in 1924 and Scott passed seven years later. Their house has always been and remains a single-family home.

The Zar and Frances Scott House, photographed by Dennis O’Hara in 2009. (Image: Northern Images)