Historic Hotels & Inns in Minnesota

Ways in

Themes in Minnesota

Minneapolis towers and warehouses

Most of Minneapolis’s historic hotels are conversions. Wilbur Foshay’s 32-story tower, finished weeks before the 1929 crash, is now W Minneapolis – The Foshay, and Rufus Rand’s 26-story Holabird & Root tower of the same year is the Rand Tower Hotel. The Hewing fills an 1897 North Loop warehouse, Nicollet Island Inn the 1893 Island Sash & Door Company building, and the Renaissance Depot the 1899 Milwaukee Road station, though only 23 suites are in the depot itself. Hotel Indigo is the exception: it was built as a hotel, the Northstar Inn, in 1963.

River towns of Southeast Bluff Country

Red Wing’s St. James Hotel opened with a grand ball on Thanksgiving Day 1875, when the town was a leading wheat market, and railroad timetables were adjusted so passengers could dine there. In Wabasha, the Hurd House of 1856, enlarged in 1887, became the Anderson Hotel, known for Dutch cooking and for cats guests could take to their rooms. Lanesboro, on the Root River, has the Historic Scanlan House, a Queen Anne B&B, and Hotel Lanesboro in a store of about 1872; in Faribault, in the Cannon River valley, furniture maker John Hutchinson’s 1892 house is the three-suite Historic Hutch House.

The North Shore and the Gunflint Trail

In Duluth, Fitger’s Inn fills the Lake Superior brewery that closed in 1972, with its lobby in the old office, whose vault, grillwork and skylight survive. At Two Harbors, the Lake County Historical Society rents the keeper’s quarters of the 1892 light station, the oldest continuously operating lighthouse on the North Shore, and room revenue helps preserve it. On the Gunflint Trail above Grand Marais, Charlie and Petra Boostrom opened Clearwater Lake Lodge in 1915, which the lodge calls the first resort on the trail, and finished their log lodge in 1926; the tables and chairs Charlie built are still in use.

Resort and park lodges

On Gull Lake, Minneapolis developer M.V. Baker built Grand View Lodge’s Main Lodge from red pine cut on the site, and the Cote family has run the resort since 1937; the historic rooms are the studio Lodge Rooms upstairs. At Itasca State Park, the state finished Douglas Lodge in 1905 to plans by Clarence H. Johnston Sr. and named it for Attorney General Wallace B. Douglas, who fought to save the park’s pines; its seven rooms open from Memorial Day weekend to early October.

Road trip

Minneapolis to Wabasha, river town to river town

Minneapolis

Start in a converted landmark: a 1929 tower downtown, the 1897 Hewing in the North Loop or Nicollet Island Inn on the river. Pick one from our Minneapolis guide.

Stillwater

Stay on the St. Croix at the Water Street Inn, the 1890 Lumbermen’s Exchange, or at the 1927 Lowell Inn; at either, book a room in the original building rather than the newer addition or annex.

Red Wing

Stay at the St. James Hotel, which opened on Thanksgiving Day 1875 and has belonged to Red Wing Shoe Company since 1977; ask for a room in the 1875 building.

Wabasha

End at the Historic Anderson House, opened as the Hurd House in 1856 and remodeled in 2011, now a self-check-in hotel with a restaurant, game room and speakeasy.

Context

History and architecture

The oldest hotel building we list in Minnesota is the Hurd House in Wabasha, opened in 1856, two years before statehood. Red Wing businessmen built the St. James Hotel, which opened in 1875, when the town was a leading wheat market, and in Stillwater the Lumbermen’s Exchange of 1890, the town’s first modern business block, housed lumber firms and the Surveyor General’s office. In Minneapolis, the Island Sash & Door Company went up on Nicollet Island in 1893 and the Milwaukee Road opened its depot in 1899. The state finished Douglas Lodge at Itasca in 1905, St. Paul opened its ‘Million-Dollar Hotel’ in 1910, and on the Gunflint Trail the Boostroms finished their log lodge in 1926. In 1929 Wilbur Foshay and Rufus Rand completed the two Minneapolis towers that are hotels today, Foshay’s weeks before the stock-market crash.