Stone House
The Stone House photographed ca. 1914 by Hugh McKenzie. [Image: UMD Martin Library]
2228 E. Superior Street | Architects: P. Cooper & Sons| Built: 1901 | Extant
Born in Saginaw, Michigan, in 1875, George Chickering Stone went to work for his father’s Wells-Stone Mercantile, dealers in wholesale groceries and hardware, which also had a Duluth branch. Stone came to the Zenith City in 1898 after his father’s business merged with Duluth pioneer wholesalers Stone-Ordean to form Stone-Ordean-Wells. A few years later he joined F. A. Patrick making men’s clothing and later served as vice-president of Clyde Iron Works and a director of the Marshall-Wells Company. In 1899 Stone married fellow Michigander Marion Burt and two years later they built a three-story Renaissance Revival house with Neoclassical elements. The three-story house is faced in salmon-colored brick, trimmed in limestone, and topped with a red tile-covered hipped roof featuring overhanging flared eaves with modillions and seven hipped dormers. The front façade contains an entry porch supported by six Ionic columns and a Roman-arch window. Inside, the house contains seventeen rooms and seven fireplaces. The Stones retired on a farm in upstate New York, where George died in 1941 and Marion in 1953. The house was purchased by mining executive John A. Savage and his wife Mary, and with five children they needed the room. The Savages moved out in 1936, and the house sat empty for the next eleven years until it became the home of the St. Louis County Historical Society; after the society moved out in 1977, the house once again became a single-family residence.
