Exterior
What style is it? This question often triggers debate among architectural historians. Even a cursory examination of the Beardsley-Cartwright House reveals that the house is in many ways unique among local Victorian houses. Its angularity, lack of soffits, sideward-facing porch entrance, many gables and light-colored leaded windows are unusual for Minneapolis houses of that period.
Actually, the house exhibits characteristics of three styles of late Victorian American architecture. In the Minnesota Historical Society file on 2648, the house is listed as a Queen Anne. It certainly exhibits some of the characteristics of the style: steeply pitched roof with seven gables; false tower; ornamental spandrels and corbels; various textures.
However, some characteristics stray from the Queen Anne style. In Sandeen and Lanegran’s book “The Lake District of Minneapolis”, it’s called a “rectilinear Queen Anne,” acknowledging the house’s straight lines. This is more typical of Shingle Style houses, a distinctly American style popular also during the period 1880-1900. It’s more informal than the Queen Anne, an all-wood house blending into the natural world rather than emphasizing artifice. In the Beardsley-Cartwright House, the shingles on the gable ends, the eyelid dormer windows, the boxy balcony, the lack of applied ornament are more characteristic of the Shingle Style, a style frequently found in the resorts and coastal cottages of New England.
The house also exhibits characteristics of the earlier Stick Style (1860-1890): large sash windows, steeply gabled roof, angular form, applied window trim, vertical and diagonal boarding.
Interior
Originally, the house was heated by individual stoves in each room. A center chimney with three flues and a back chimney assured that all areas of the house would have a heating source. Sections of the house that weren’t being used could be closed off from the heated rooms. The fireplace was charcoal-burning, and the house was illuminated by gaslights.
The dining room had a pass-through closet to the kitchen, a storage closet and an exquisite parquet floor with a buzzer to press to call the servants from the kitchen.
An unheated summer kitchen and privy built onto the back of the house provided access to the partial basement as well as storage space for root vegetables. In the summer, a stove could be attached to the back chimney to keep cooking heat out of the house proper. The plumbed bathroom had a pull-chain toilet, sink, and extra-long clawfoot bathtub (still there). On the third floor were the servants’ quarters: two spacious rooms with closets, plus attic space.
Today, all of these rooms are configured as they were in 1885. Over the years, the only parts of the house that have undergone significant alterations were the cellar, extended into a full basement in the 1930s, and the summer kitchen, made into a four-season addition with shower bathroom in 1996. Another major change to the property was the conversion of the two-story, three-stall horse barn into a single-story garage in the early 1930s.
Whatever you want to call it, inside and outside, the Beardsley-Cartwright House is definitely stylistically distinctive among Victorian houses in the city.