What was the Twin Cities like in the Gilded Age?

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Inside the grand dining room of the James J. Hill mansion in St. Paul, visitors can see a perfect illustration of the Gilded Age. All they have to do is raise their eyes to the glittering gold leaf ceiling.

“School groups look up and they think the whole thing is solid gold,” said Michael Campbell, who supervises the Minnesota Historical Society site. “When really it’s just a very thin layer of gold that, underneath it, has tin. If the gold wasn’t there, that tin would not look impressive at all.”

The Gilded Age describes the period in post-Civil War America that stretched from the 1870s to the 1890s. It was a time of fabulous facades and dramatic disparities — of new money vs. old money, bustles and corsets, railroad booms and changing fortunes.

As HBO’s “The Gilded Age” is set to return for a third season this week, it seemed like a good time to answer this reader question for Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s community-driven reporting project: What was the Twin Cities like in the Gilded Age?

While the television show is set in New York among the Astors and Vanderbilts (the family whose story at least partly inspired the fictional Russells), Minnesota was also the backdrop to plenty of Gilded Age excess and iniquity.

Local industrial tycoons like Hill, who ran the Great Northern Railway, lumber baron Frederick Weyerhaeuser, and flour magnates William Washburn and Charles Pillsbury all rose to prominence in this era.

“These are the movers and shakers. They’re industrialists. Their critics would call them robber barons,” said Bill Convery, director of research at the Minnesota Historical Society.

By the time Hill climbed from clerk to railroad magnate, he became outrageously wealthy — with many homes, including one close to the Astors in Manhattan and another in the “Millionaires’ Village” on Georgia’s Jekyll Island, along with J.P. Morgan and William Rockefeller.

In St. Paul, Hill collected French landscape paintings in the art gallery of his Summit Avenue mansion, at the time the state’s biggest and most expensive private home. Hill’s wife, Mary, a waitress when they first met, received calls from friends in the mansion’s music room on Tuesdays.

To thank Hill for building the Stone Arch Bridge, bringing his railroad across the Mississippi River, Minneapolis leaders threw a lavish surprise party for him in 1884, said Campbell.

It was held at Washburn’s giant mansion Fair Oaks (which stood in what is today Washburn Fair Oaks Park, across from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts). They gave Hill a silver Tiffany tray engraved with a scene of the bridge and the city and embellished with his own portrait in profile.

Of course, the Gilded Age in the Twin Cities was not a giant party for everyone.

The era’s name was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their satirical novel “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.” Their 1873 book describes a time when a veneer of excess and economic growth could not fully cover the rampant greed, corruption and injustice of the era.

During those decades, Minnesota went through tremendous change, said Convery.

The state’s population skyrocketed with new European immigrants and settlers, adding nearly 900,000 people between 1870 and 1880, Convery said. Federal legislation continued to chip away at the land holdings and rights of Native Americans in Minnesota, and mandatory boarding schools brought forced assimilation.

In those years after Reconstruction, there were relatively few Black Minnesotans — they made up less than 1% of the state’s population, according to a Minnesota Historical Society account. In the late 1800s, St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood had just begun to develop as a middle-class Black community.

Across the Twin Cities, the Gilded Age was a time of “huge industrial growth,” Convery said, as Minneapolis’ flour mills rose and St. Paul became a railroad hub.

“The railroads connected Minnesota in a spider web of steel, bringing all of the products of the farmland, of the plains, of Minnesota, all the wheat and the corn, back into the Twin Cities for processing,” Convery said.

Many people worked for the railroad or in the flour, lumber or woolen mills. Others found work as maids, butlers or cooks for wealthy families. These jobs didn’t pay as much, but because room and board was provided, they gave workers a chance to save, said Campbell.

In those days, the air was thick with smoke from the trains and from the coal being burned to heat homes and factories, Convery said.

“The Twin Cities were dirty, crowded, polyglot, vibrant communities where a lot was happening,” he said.

While Hill and his contemporaries built trophy houses up on St. Paul’s Summit Avenue and Park Avenue in Minneapolis that included newfangled amenities like electricity and central heating, immigrants found cheap, barebones homes down along the Mississippi River.

In Minneapolis, newcomers settled in what was called the Bohemian Flats (today, this area is a city park of the same name). “These are sort of below ground, the flood plains, the part of the community where real estate is cheap, because the river can rise up and wash you out in any given springtime,” Convery said.

In St. Paul, the community of Swede Hollow — also now a park, after the city cleared it as a health hazard in the 1950s — was crowded with new immigrants.

“They were living in shacks with no interior plumbing or electricity or running water. It’s kind of a subsistence existence,” Convery said. “And this is in really huge contrast to the other side of the scale of the great mansions.”

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Read more Curious Minnesota stories:

How did Nicollet Island become parkland with private housing on it?

Why were so many of Minneapolis’ Park Avenue mansions torn down?

Why does the Stone Arch Bridge cross the river at such an odd angle?

Why was I-94 built through St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood?