The two 20-plus-story buildings that form Summit House Condominiums at 400 and 410 Groveland Av. in Minneapolis are highly visible landmarks in the neighborhood just south of Loring Park.
But before Summit House appeared in the late 1960s, the site was occupied by a superb mansion built, like so many others in Minneapolis, by a man who turned flour into gold.
His name was Frederic W. Clifford, and he co-founded the Cream of Wheat Co., which turned what was once considered a flour-milling byproduct, the so-called "middlings," into the nation's best-selling hot breakfast cereal. Initially based in Fargo, the company moved to Minneapolis in the mid 1890s and manufactured its cereal in the city for more than 100 years.
Clifford's mansion, at 325 Clifton Av., was designed by one of the city's premier architects, Harry Wild Jones, and completed in 1905. Later, Jones designed several other palatial homes for Cream of Wheat executives on Lake of the Isles, all of which still stand. But Clifford's lost mansion was perhaps the finest of the lot.
Built at a reputed cost of $750,000 — a fortune at the time — it was a long, high-gabled Tudor Revival affair in stone, brick, stucco and half-timbering that posed on magnificent grounds extending a full block south to Groveland Aveue.
Jones, whose best known works include the mighty Butler Square Building in downtown Minneapolis (1908) and the Lakewood Cemetery Memorial Chapel (1910), usually managed to animate even the most clichéd historic styles, and Clifford's mansion was no exception.
Big Tudor Revival houses were a dime a dozen in the early decades of the 20th century and many were by the book, their designers content to dress them up with a well-worn set of architectural gestures. Jones, however, always seemed to have a novel trick or two up his sleeve.
The Clifford mansion's most distinctive touch was a two-story semicircular rear projection, resembling a round tower, that was open at the base to create an inset porch. Past the porch, a grand terrace provided a view across the mansion's expansive lawn.