The honest answer is: whenever you happen to be here. The Gilded Age Mansion Tour runs all year, and it goes inside two of the city’s landmark houses, 300 Clifton and the Pillsbury Mansion, in every season. But if you have a choice of dates, two stretches of the calendar give a historic house tour in Minneapolis a little extra atmosphere: the ghost-story weeks of fall, and the handful of December weeks when this becomes the only public mansion tour in the city. Here is what each season looks like from inside the house.
What you see on the year-round mansion tour
The tour boards at the Pillsbury Club, inside the Charles S. Pillsbury Mansion at 100 East 22nd Street. Hewitt and Brown designed it between 1912 and 1914 in English Gothic Revival, all jointed gray Bedford limestone, and the City of Minneapolis landmark record still calls it a showcase of the firm’s skill. Locals call it the mansion flour built. From there the trolley rolls past the great houses of Washburn-Fair Oaks and Park Avenue and up to Loring Park, where it stops at us.
300 Clifton is the Eugene J. Carpenter Mansion: Georgian, remodelled in 1906 by Edwin H. Hewitt, with interiors by John S. Bradstreet, and listed on the National Register in 1977 and as a Minneapolis landmark in 1978. Our guides will tell you it is the finest Georgian architecture in Minnesota, and they will show you why in the Drawing Room, which still has its original 1906 lighting, paintings and furniture. The house earned its nickname, the birthplace of the arts in Minneapolis, because Carpenter chaired the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts from 1911 to 1922, the organization that became the Minneapolis Institute of Art. We wrote more about that story in Minneapolis mansion tours: inside 300 Clifton, and about the fortunes behind the neighborhood in how the families who built Minneapolis’s mansions made their money.
Fall: ghost season in the old houses
September and October
Old houses get a little louder in autumn, and both of these have stories. The Gilded Age tour itself is a history tour, but it shares a departure point with the Candlelight Ghost Tour, which leaves from the Pillsbury Club after dark, and the club runs its own psychic readings and paranormal ghost hunts through the season. Plenty of guests do the mansion tour in daylight and the ghost tour that night. If you would rather sleep on it, our Dead & Breakfast package hands you a self-guided ghost map of 300 Clifton, EMF reading equipment, and discounted tickets to the Candlelight Ghost Tour. Skeptics are welcome. Skeptics usually come back down to the kitchen a little faster than they went up.
Christmas at the mansion
Late November through December
Here is the fact most visitors do not know. The other grand house people think of for a Minneapolis mansion tour, the American Swedish Institute’s Turnblad Mansion, suspends its public tours during its annual holiday exhibition. That leaves the Gilded Age Mansion Tour as the only public mansion tour in Minneapolis during the holidays, and it is the reason “Christmas at the mansion” is a real thing here rather than a phrase. 300 Clifton is dressed for the season, the Pillsbury Club fills with garland and a holiday market, and the same trolley that runs the mansion tour by day runs the Holiday Light Ride by night. We covered the details in can you tour a historic mansion in Minneapolis at Christmas? The short version: yes, and you can bring your family, your office, or a date.
The one mansion tour where you can also spend the night
Whatever season you pick, one thing does not change: 300 Clifton is the only mansion in Minneapolis you can tour and sleep in. The tour ends, the other guests reboard the trolley, and you walk upstairs. Every room is different. The Crystal Mansion Room and the Georgian Room are the ones to look at first; the Grand Edwardian is the one to look at second. Overnight guests also get the hot tub and the movie room, and the rest of the roughly 20,000-square-foot estate to wander with the QR-code history stops around the house. If you need a longer downtown stay before or after, Oakland’s on 9th offers furnished studios by the month.
So, when should you go?
If you want ghost stories with your Gilded Age history, come in September or October. If you want the houses at their most theatrical, and the only public mansion tour in town, come in December. If you just want to see the finest Georgian house in Minnesota and the mansion flour built, any date on the tour calendar will do. Book the Gilded Age Mansion Tour, then book your room at 300 Clifton and make it the one night in Minneapolis you sleep inside the history.
Keep reading: Can You Honeymoon in Minneapolis? A Minimoon at a Historic Mansion in Loring Park