Painter, illustrator, architect, furniture designer; one of the founders of the Rochester Art Club (1877) and the Rochester Society of Arts and Crafts (1897).
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HARVEY ELLIS, ARTIST, DEAD
His Body at Syracuse Morgue Unclaimed and Unidentified For Days
SYRACUSE, N. Y., Jan 11.- Harvey Ellis an artist and architect of reputation, was buried in this city to-day at the expense of acquaintances. He died at a hospital a week ago Saturday, and, until yesterday, his body lay at a morgue unclaimed.
When his identity became known, men who knew him at once arranged the burial. Bishop Thomas Hendrick of Rochester, his friend, was to conduct the services, but was unable to attend, and a local priest officiated. Only a score of persons was present.
Mr. Ellis had three pictures called Silhouettes at the Paris Exposition and also at the Pan American (Exposition). His paintings in the exhibits of the American Water Color Society at the National Academy of Design are well known among artists. He had a wife, from whom he was separated, and a brother said to be in the Middletown Asylum.
Mrr. Ellis was born in Rochester in 1852. He studied under Edwin White of the National Academy and exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1900. He was a member of the New York Water Color Club and President of the Rochester Society of Arts and Crafts. He was also an architect.
SOURCE- New York Times, January 12, 1904
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From a Rochester, NY newspaper:
Death of Harvey Ellis
Harvey Ellis, formerly a resident of Rochester and a well-known architect, died Sunday night in St. Joseph's Hospital, Syracuse, aged 53 years. Besides his wife he leaves one brother, Charles S. Ellis.
Mr. Ellis was born in Albany and was educated at West Point. After leaving college he went to New York, where he began the study of architecture. Leaving that city he came to Rochester and entered business with his brother, with whom he remained for several years, when he went West.
Mr. Ellis returned to this city several years later and again entered business with his brother. Last year he went to Syracuse, where he became associated with Gustave Stickley, (as) an architect. He had been prominently connected with "The Craftsman", an art magazine.
Mr. Ellis was the first winner of the Grant tomb competition. Among artists and architects he ranked very high and was spoken of by the "American Architect" as being one of the three great architects of the country.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904), architect, artist and craftsman, designed several buildings in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN. He was an illustrator for The Craftsman and a designer of furniture for Gustav Stickley.
Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of four children of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis. Even as a child, Ellis had an interest in the arts and the collection includes several of his early drawings. Believing that Harvey needed more discipline, his father arranged for him to enter West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was discharged on January 12, 1872 for tardiness, personal untidiness and gross neglect in his French assignments. There is also some indication that Ellis's downfall was the result of a forbidden affaire d'amour with an actress. Soon after the expulsion from West Point, Ellis's father sent him to Europe.
His marriage annulled, his future uncertain, and exiled in Europe, Ellis developed a passion for painting that he would pursue for the rest of his life. His time in Europe was not long, and in 1872 he returned to his family, now living in Albany, NY. Family relationships were soon strained and Ellis moved to New York in 1875 where he was employed by an engineering office and studied architecture under Arthur G. Gilman. Dissatisfied by this static position, Ellis left New York in 1877 for Albany where he met and grew to admire the architect Henry H. Richardson, whose Romanesque style inspired Ellis's later work.
Ellis accompanied his family when they returned to Rochester in September, 1877. Shortly thereafter he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful and Harvey Ellis was able to spend his time designing while Charles Ellis attracted new clients. Many commercial and residential buildings were designed by the office, the most important commission being for the new Federal Building (now Rochester City Hall) built in the Romanesque style.
In 1885 mounting friction between the Ellis Brothers prompted Harvey to move once again, first to Utica, NY then to St. Paul, MN. In 1886-87 he was employed as a drafsman by the St. Paul firms of J. Walter Stevens, Mould & McNichol, and Leroy S. Buffington. Buffington claimed to be the originator of the metal skeleton frame that made building tall structures feasible and he took out a patent on the process. His claim to be the inventor of the skyscraper was refuted, but using the designs created by Harvey Ellis, Buffington is credited with playing a pivotal role in refining the new method of construction.
Ellis continued to design houses, churches, banks and public buildings (many never built) for Buffington and submit renderings to architectural offices in St. Paul, St. Louis, MO and other Midwestern, and perhaps Southwestern, cities. He returned to Rochester in 1894 and rejoined his brother's firm. At some point he was married and lived in a rooming house on Lake Avenue with his wife. The economic depression meant fewer architectural commissions, but Ellis found employment decorating interiors.
Ellis's appreciation of the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement is apparent in the designs he created during this period. He was a founding member and president of the Rochester Arts & Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. In 1894 he helped organize the Society's first exhibition, a display of Japanese prints and modern French posters.
In 1903 Harvey Ellis made the arrangements to display in Rochester's Mechanics Institute an extensive exhibition of arts and crafts decorative arts. The display was organized by Gustav Stickley and first shown the previous year in Syracuse. Following the exhibition Harvey Ellis, now separated from his wife, moved to Syracuse at the invitation of Stickley to write for The Craftsman. Ellis published several articles that included his designs for arts and crafts homes and interiors. Ellis's use of curves and inlays brought a more elegant and lighter style to Stickley's "mission" furniture.
Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904 at the age of 52 due, in part to acute alcoholism. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904) architect, artist and craftsman, was one of the foremost architectural renderers of his time and a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement. Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis' four children. Despite the boy's evident artistic nature and talent, Ellis' father arranged for him to enter the U. S. Military Academy at West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was among 15 cadets discharged less than seven months later for academic insufficiency.
There is little documentation of the next six years of Ellis' life. What few facts have been uncovered indicate that he spent some time in New York and Albany before returning to Rochester in early September 1877. He was a founder of the Rochester Art Club on September 5, 1877, and quickly gained recognition as a painter. In early 1879, he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful from the start, producing designs for many commercial and residential buildings in and around Rochester.
Details of Ellis' location and activities are once again scant for most of 1885-86. He is known to have been in Rochester early in 1885 and to have married there, while he submitted a competition entry for a statue of Ulysses Grant from Utica, New York, in the fall. From 1886-1893, Ellis worked for a number of architectural firms throughout the Midwest. These included: Charles Mould and then J. Walter Stevens in St. Paul, Minnesota; Leroy Buffington and Orff & Orff in Minneapolis; Eckel and Mann in St. Joseph, Missouri; and George Mann and Randall, Ellis and Baker in St. Louis. Ellis returned to Rochester in 1893 and rejoined architectural practice with his brother but was deeply immersed in his painting and in the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1897, Ellis, Claude Bragdon, and M. Louise Stowell were founding members of the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. The Society's first exhibition, of Japanese prints and French posters, was held at Rochester's Cutler Building in May 1897.
Following the 1903 installation of an Arts and Crafts exhibition at Rochester's Mechanics Institute, Harvey Ellis relocated to Syracuse, N.Y., where he began writing - and illustrating - for Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman on Arts and Crafts architecture and interiors. Some of the renderings which accompanied these articles influenced the furniture produced by Stickley. Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904, at the age of 52. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
Source: https://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=871
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-WIFE AND ADOPTED SON
Through the years certain parts of the biography of Harvey Ellis have been clarified -- although some important gaps still remain -- but his wife has remained largely in the historical shadows. Data for the 1900 United States census recorded on June 14 of that year reveal her first name, Alice, and 1860 as the date of her birth and, by inference, 1885 as the year of her marriage, no documentation of which has yet been located.
When the Ellises were in Minneapolis they had adopted a child, and Ellis could have been supporting both a wife and a child then living apart from him. They named the child, a boy then about four years old, Charles Hayden Ellis and called him Charlie, which possibly honored Ellis' younger brother and former business partner Charles. One speculates that Hayden might have been his wife's maiden name. The paper reported that the boy's last name was Nicholson and that he had been born in Indianapolis and placed for adoption in Sheltering Arms of that city. No adoption record in Indianapolis has been located. However, there was also a reference to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis, a more likely source, since Ellis had no known connection with Indianapolis. The archives of Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis yielded the name of Leonard Mickelson who was one and a half years old when he was admitted on October 1, 1884. He was placed "on trial for adoption" on April 23, 1888 with unidentified people. Considering the age of the child, the date of placement, the phonetic similarity between Nicholson and Mickelson, the possible confusion between Indianapolis and Minneapolis, and the often careless, inaccurate reporting in these Post Dispatch articles, very likely Leonard Mickelson's adoptive parents were Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Ellis.
It has not been possible to establish an exact calendar of happenings or determine where husband and wife were at certain times as events in St. Louis unfolded during the next four months, and what follows may need future correction. Soon after arriving in St. Louis Mrs. Ellis and Charlie moved from the Garfield Hotel to a boarding house. Other residents and servants observed her habitual mistreatment of the boy, then about six years old, which culminated at some point in June in her leaving the child alone while she traveled to St. Joseph. Because Ellis also was either out of town, according to his employer George Mann, or "on a spree" -- more of that later -- according to Mrs. Ellis in a subsequent police interview, Mann intervened and took the child to the central police station. Mann and a police sergeant then sought to place Charlie in the St. Joseph Asylum, a facility for indigent or abandoned children as well as for juvenile delinquents. However, because neither parent was available to sign necessary paperwork, on June 16 Charlie temporarily went to the House of Refuge, a residence for widows and orphans. Within the next week or so he was released at Mann's request to, rather amazingly, Mrs. Ellis who by then was back in St. Louis.
About a month later, on July 21, she asked a colored [Post Dispatch usage] washerwoman named Josie Bates, who worked at her lodgings, to take the child for a week, giving strict instructions that he was not to have any contact with whites [Post Dispatch usage]. Two days later Mrs. Ellis told Mrs. Bass that she never wanted to see the child again and left a bundle of clothing for him. She then moved to a different boarding house and effectively disappeared. Because someone reported to the police that a colored woman was keeping a white child secluded in her house, Mrs. Bass was interviewed by a neighborhood patrolman. The second abandonment was thus revealed, and Charlie again was taken to the central police station, from where a court matron then took charge of him. On July 27 Mrs. Ellis was located, another investigation ensued, and the next day Ellis was summoned to the station; he arrived intoxicated. Told to return the following day, he instead left for St. Joseph. Again Mann became involved in the matter, but, inexplicably, so did the police chief and the mayor of St. Louis. On August 5, accompanied by Charlie, the court matron personally took a report about the situation from the police chief, dated that day, to the mayor and told him she had located an affluent childless couple who were willing to take the boy. The mayor ostensibly ordered her to temporarily place the child with them.
The next day, August 6, a story headlined: "Gave The Child Away/ Mrs. Harry Ellis's Disposition Of Her Six-Year-Old Son/ Given To A Colored Woman Under Mysterious Circumstances" appeared on an inner page of the paper. The fact that Mrs. Ellis's husband Harry was an architect working for Mann on the new city hall did not seem to resonate that day with the reporter. However, by the following day Harry Ellis had been identified as Harvey Ellis, and the story had jumped to the lead position on the front page with a large-font headline that proclaimed "Little Charlie Ellis/ Twice Abandoned In A Great City By His Parents." The story of the previous day was retold in somewhat garbled fashion.
A day after the front-page story, another murky element was added by an article on an inner page headlined: "What Did She Mean?/ Architect Mann Unable To Understand Mrs. Harvey Ellis' Statements." She apparently had publicly said that Mann and city politicians were to blame for "all the trouble." Mann responded only with:
"I do not think that at this time the woman is fully responsible for all she says, as she has had much trouble lately. We all thought that the condition of affairs would improve if we got the two [Harvey and his wife] separated. Ellis has, I know, a good reason for not living with the woman and I hope that matters will all be quieted down, as he is one of the best draughtsmen in the country and capable of doing a great deal of good work."
It is a given that no responsible adult in her right mind, even an abusive adoptive mother, would leave a six-year-old child alone while she went out of town. However, all evidence to date points to the fact that Mrs. Ellis was not a responsible adult, and indeed one of the subheadings in the story about giving Charlie to the washerwoman proclaimed "Mrs. Ellis Is Ill." After that incident she was diagnosed with severe nervous excitement and entered the Mullanphy Hospital. There her actions led to the conclusion that she was insane -- it is necessary to keep in mind that insanity in the 1890s described a range of conditions that would be given other diagnoses today. After release from the hospital, she returned to her lodgings and recovered to some degree but was described as still being very ill.
Ellis reluctantly relinquished Charlie only after unsuccessfully asking his brother Charles, living in Rochester with his wife and infant daughter, to take him when it was apparent that Mrs. Ellis could not or would not care for him. There is no further word of the child until half a year later when the Post Dispatch reported that he had been returned, at an unspecified time, to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis. Although the adoption record there had noted that it was a trial adoption, to date no record of Charlie's return has been located. One wonders if he really had been quickly placed with an unidentified affluent couple, or had that been just a statement to the press intended for some reason to remove him from the spotlight and thereby dampen public interest in the situation? Whatever the case, one can only hope that the rest of Charlie's life became more settled and happier than his first six years had been.
As many sensational stories often do, the one about Charlie also soon faded away, although about three weeks later it was summarized, very briefly, in an article whose main purpose was to report that the Ellises had legally separated -- again, why would this have been of interest to the public? It noted that "Mr. Ellis will contribute a stipulated sum to his wife's support, but they will not undertake living together again."
That would seem to have ended the marital history of the Ellises in St. Louis, but there is more to the story. As pieced together from the two September 1893 Post Dispatch articles, after the publicity about Charlie, Mrs. Ellis became addicted to morphine and the sedative chloral hydrate. One wonders of course if drugs might have played a part in her earlier aberrant mistreatment of the child. Whatever the case, concerned about his presumably estranged wife's addiction, Ellis thought a visit to her mother in Rochester might be good for her. The exact time of her visit and how long she was in Rochester are not known -- it could have been days, weeks or months at anytime during the previous three years. That Ellis regularly sent her part of his wages "all the time," as he had agreed to do three years earlier, suggests that her stay might have been lengthy.
On August 25, 1893 Ellis also was in Rochester, for on that day he signed and dated a plein-air pencil sketch of a scene in Brighton, a Rochester suburb. Possibly he was there to visit his wife, possibly her family had summoned him, possibly he had come to retrieve her. Whatever the circumstances, shortly thereafter they both returned to St. Louis, apparently separately. Once back, she accused Ellis of living with another woman during her absence. He denied it, and his office colleagues said that she had become morbidly jealous, repeatedly accusing him of being involved with other women. There was another quarrel, and on the morning of September 7, 1893 she attempted suicide by ingesting a large but not lethal dose of chloral hydrate that she had bought at a drugstore -- these were the days when powerful sedatives seemed to be rather casually available and daily newspapers openly advertised for sale other products such as, for example, Tincture of Opium. It resulted in deep sleep rather than death. That too became sensational front page fodder headlined in even larger font than previously used for the story about Charlie, "Was Jealous/ Draughtsman Harvey Ellis' Wife Takes A Dose Of Poison./ She Claimed Her Husband Thought More Of Another Woman/ Her Jealously Alleged To Have No Genuine Foundation."
Surprisingly, in view of the legal separation, her suicide attempt apparently happened in Ellis's presence at the Garfield Hotel, where he had been living ever since coming to St. Louis three years earlier. Shocked and too upset to function -- or was it just possibly that he wanted to avoid the press that seemed to be ever-present in St. Louis when events concerned him? -- he called his friend George Siemens at work. Siemens ran to the nearby City Hall Dispensary to have an ambulance dispatched to the Garfield Hotel. He went with it to the hotel and accompanied Mrs. Ellis back to the Dispensary, remaining there while her stomach was pumped. Immediately after that, a reporter was allowed to question her before she was taken to the City Hospital. She told him she was living at the hotel with her husband. Siemens then terminated the interview. Later Ellis went to her at the hospital, The next day's headline was "Sorry She Did It." That morning when she was interviewed before being discharged from the hospital, a reporter -- the press again -- described her as a "frail little woman." She talked to him in rambling fashion about family troubles and other unspecified subjects for half an hour. The reporter judged her "not responsible for her behaviour," and doctors at the hospital thought that her mind was "in a measure unbalanced." When asked where she was going from the hospital, she said:
"Back to Harvey; he always supports me, even if he does love another woman better than he does me. He is a pretty good follow [even] if he does drink sometimes, and I am going back to him right away."
One can only speculate that compassion, affection and love existed -- perhaps submerged from time to time -- along with periodic exasperation and, eventually, a religious faith that decried divorce. How else can their on-again/off-again relationship that continued in Rochester for the next decade, that is for the rest of Harvey Ellis' life, be explained?
Source: http://harveyellisfacts.blogspot.com/2010/11/mrs.html
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The University of Minnesota survived its early hardships with financial assistance from two primary sources: businessman, governor, and philanthropist John S. Pillsbury, who became a member of the University's Board of Regents in 1863; and the federal government's Morrill Act, passed in 1862. These two came to the forefront in the 1880s, when the Minnesota State Legislature accused the University of diverting Morrill Act funds from the agricultural college to other parts of the University. As a result, the state government threatened to divide the two into separate institutions, which would have severely hampered the University's access to federal funding and subsequent growth.
While these developments were occurring, construction had begun on a new Science Hall in 1887, which would house the applied sciences. However, a fire severely damaged the building when it was halfway finished, and the University requested $150,000 from the legislature to salvage the project. Having already committed $100,000, the state was unwilling to pledge any more money, so Mr. Pillsbury stepped in to save Science Hall. He provided all of the $150,000 in a deal that would keep the agricultural college and University together, thereby securing the future of the school. For Pillsbury's efforts, the University changed the building's name from Science Hall to Pillsbury Hall.
Pillsbury commissioned the local architect Leroy S. Buffington to design the new building. Buffington had previously designed Pillsbury's "A" Mill, as well as the University's Eddy Hall. However, Buffington's employee Harvey Ellis was actually responsible for the building's design. Ellis became known for bringing the Richardsonian Romanesque style to Minnesota, and he based Pillsbury Hall on Harvard's famous Sever Hall. In addition to Richardsonian Romanesque, Ellis also incorporated elements of the Prairie School, English Arts and Crafts, Gothic, and Victorian architectural styles.
The 30,000- square-foot structure is made of yellow and red sandstone, both quarried from Minnesota. The main center section is a square, with two horizontal wings on each side, and there is a distinctive off-set tower near the front entrance arches. Different carvings dot the building, depicting gargoyles, Medusa, and sea serpents, among other figures. However, these intricate designs (as well as the sandstone's original colors) were concealed over the years by soot from a nearby heating plant. It wasn't until 1985 that the exterior of the building was extensively cleaned, and its impressive features were returned to their original state.
For a brief period in the 1920s, the University's health center was located in the Pillsbury Hall basement. For most of its history, the rest of the building was home to different scientific disciplines, including zoology, botany, and geology. However, most of these departments moved to other buildings over the years, and in 2017 the only remaining department (Geology and Geophysics) finally left the building.
Since the 1990s, the Department of English had been trying to relocate to Pillsbury Hall, and their dream finally started becoming a reality in 2018. That year, the state legislature passed a bill that would fund a major renovation of Pillsbury Hall, since its interior was long overdue for an upgrade. The new design is catered to the English Department, and includes space for classrooms, offices, magazine production, and even a performance space in the attic. Acclaimed Minneapolis artist Seitu-Jones was recently selected to create a piece for the updated building, and construction is expected to be complete in the summer of 2021.
SOURCE- Gronseth, Adrian. "Pillsbury Hall." Clio: Your Guide to History. April 14, 2020. Accessed January 27, 2023. https://www.theclio.com/tour/1312/8
Sources
State Historic Preservation Office Staff. National Register of Historic Places Inventory -- Nomination Form, National Park Service. August 23rd 1984. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/33466d89-64c2-4ea4-9bd8-1b3f574c3c96.
Pillsbury Hall, University of Minnesota -- Earth & Environmental Sciences . Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.esci.umn.edu/facilities/pillsbury.
Pillsbury Hall Renovation, University of Minnesota -- College of Liberal Arts. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://cla.umn.edu/pillsbury-hall-renovation.
Bierschbach, Briana. Dayton Signs Minnesota Public Works Spending Bill Despite 'Concerns', MPR News. May 30th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/05/30/dayton-signs-minn-public-works-bill-despite-concerns.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 5th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-tuesdays-primary-als-ice-bucket-follow-reporter-panel/.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 12th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-macys-future-pillsbury-hall-attic-presidential-politics/.
Pillsbury Hall -- University of Minnesota, Historic Twin Cities. October 29th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. http://www.historictwincities.com/2018/10/29/pillsbury-hall-university-of-minnesota/.
Nelson, Rick. Pillsbury Hall, U's Second-Oldest Building, in Line for $36 Million in TLC, Star Tribune. September 15th 2017. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.startribune.com/pillsbury-hall-u-s-second-oldest-building-in-line-for-36-million-in-tlc/444688963/.
Additional Information
The National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the Old Campus Historic District, which includes Pillsbury Hall
The University page with information and updates about the ongoing Pillsbury Hall renovation
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HARVEY ELLIS, ARTIST, DEAD
His Body at Syracuse Morgue Unclaimed and Unidentified For Days
SYRACUSE, N. Y., Jan 11.- Harvey Ellis an artist and architect of reputation, was buried in this city to-day at the expense of acquaintances. He died at a hospital a week ago Saturday, and, until yesterday, his body lay at a morgue unclaimed.
When his identity became known, men who knew him at once arranged the burial. Bishop Thomas Hendrick of Rochester, his friend, was to conduct the services, but was unable to attend, and a local priest officiated. Only a score of persons was present.
Mr. Ellis had three pictures called Silhouettes at the Paris Exposition and also at the Pan American (Exposition). His paintings in the exhibits of the American Water Color Society at the National Academy of Design are well known among artists. He had a wife, from whom he was separated, and a brother said to be in the Middletown Asylum.
Mrr. Ellis was born in Rochester in 1852. He studied under Edwin White of the National Academy and exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1900. He was a member of the New York Water Color Club and President of the Rochester Society of Arts and Crafts. He was also an architect.
SOURCE- New York Times, January 12, 1904
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From a Rochester, NY newspaper:
Death of Harvey Ellis
Harvey Ellis, formerly a resident of Rochester and a well-known architect, died Sunday night in St. Joseph's Hospital, Syracuse, aged 53 years. Besides his wife he leaves one brother, Charles S. Ellis.
Mr. Ellis was born in Albany and was educated at West Point. After leaving college he went to New York, where he began the study of architecture. Leaving that city he came to Rochester and entered business with his brother, with whom he remained for several years, when he went West.
Mr. Ellis returned to this city several years later and again entered business with his brother. Last year he went to Syracuse, where he became associated with Gustave Stickley, (as) an architect. He had been prominently connected with "The Craftsman", an art magazine.
Mr. Ellis was the first winner of the Grant tomb competition. Among artists and architects he ranked very high and was spoken of by the "American Architect" as being one of the three great architects of the country.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904), architect, artist and craftsman, designed several buildings in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN. He was an illustrator for The Craftsman and a designer of furniture for Gustav Stickley.
Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of four children of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis. Even as a child, Ellis had an interest in the arts and the collection includes several of his early drawings. Believing that Harvey needed more discipline, his father arranged for him to enter West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was discharged on January 12, 1872 for tardiness, personal untidiness and gross neglect in his French assignments. There is also some indication that Ellis's downfall was the result of a forbidden affaire d'amour with an actress. Soon after the expulsion from West Point, Ellis's father sent him to Europe.
His marriage annulled, his future uncertain, and exiled in Europe, Ellis developed a passion for painting that he would pursue for the rest of his life. His time in Europe was not long, and in 1872 he returned to his family, now living in Albany, NY. Family relationships were soon strained and Ellis moved to New York in 1875 where he was employed by an engineering office and studied architecture under Arthur G. Gilman. Dissatisfied by this static position, Ellis left New York in 1877 for Albany where he met and grew to admire the architect Henry H. Richardson, whose Romanesque style inspired Ellis's later work.
Ellis accompanied his family when they returned to Rochester in September, 1877. Shortly thereafter he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful and Harvey Ellis was able to spend his time designing while Charles Ellis attracted new clients. Many commercial and residential buildings were designed by the office, the most important commission being for the new Federal Building (now Rochester City Hall) built in the Romanesque style.
In 1885 mounting friction between the Ellis Brothers prompted Harvey to move once again, first to Utica, NY then to St. Paul, MN. In 1886-87 he was employed as a drafsman by the St. Paul firms of J. Walter Stevens, Mould & McNichol, and Leroy S. Buffington. Buffington claimed to be the originator of the metal skeleton frame that made building tall structures feasible and he took out a patent on the process. His claim to be the inventor of the skyscraper was refuted, but using the designs created by Harvey Ellis, Buffington is credited with playing a pivotal role in refining the new method of construction.
Ellis continued to design houses, churches, banks and public buildings (many never built) for Buffington and submit renderings to architectural offices in St. Paul, St. Louis, MO and other Midwestern, and perhaps Southwestern, cities. He returned to Rochester in 1894 and rejoined his brother's firm. At some point he was married and lived in a rooming house on Lake Avenue with his wife. The economic depression meant fewer architectural commissions, but Ellis found employment decorating interiors.
Ellis's appreciation of the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement is apparent in the designs he created during this period. He was a founding member and president of the Rochester Arts & Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. In 1894 he helped organize the Society's first exhibition, a display of Japanese prints and modern French posters.
In 1903 Harvey Ellis made the arrangements to display in Rochester's Mechanics Institute an extensive exhibition of arts and crafts decorative arts. The display was organized by Gustav Stickley and first shown the previous year in Syracuse. Following the exhibition Harvey Ellis, now separated from his wife, moved to Syracuse at the invitation of Stickley to write for The Craftsman. Ellis published several articles that included his designs for arts and crafts homes and interiors. Ellis's use of curves and inlays brought a more elegant and lighter style to Stickley's "mission" furniture.
Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904 at the age of 52 due, in part to acute alcoholism. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904) architect, artist and craftsman, was one of the foremost architectural renderers of his time and a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement. Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis' four children. Despite the boy's evident artistic nature and talent, Ellis' father arranged for him to enter the U. S. Military Academy at West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was among 15 cadets discharged less than seven months later for academic insufficiency.
There is little documentation of the next six years of Ellis' life. What few facts have been uncovered indicate that he spent some time in New York and Albany before returning to Rochester in early September 1877. He was a founder of the Rochester Art Club on September 5, 1877, and quickly gained recognition as a painter. In early 1879, he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful from the start, producing designs for many commercial and residential buildings in and around Rochester.
Details of Ellis' location and activities are once again scant for most of 1885-86. He is known to have been in Rochester early in 1885 and to have married there, while he submitted a competition entry for a statue of Ulysses Grant from Utica, New York, in the fall. From 1886-1893, Ellis worked for a number of architectural firms throughout the Midwest. These included: Charles Mould and then J. Walter Stevens in St. Paul, Minnesota; Leroy Buffington and Orff & Orff in Minneapolis; Eckel and Mann in St. Joseph, Missouri; and George Mann and Randall, Ellis and Baker in St. Louis. Ellis returned to Rochester in 1893 and rejoined architectural practice with his brother but was deeply immersed in his painting and in the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1897, Ellis, Claude Bragdon, and M. Louise Stowell were founding members of the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. The Society's first exhibition, of Japanese prints and French posters, was held at Rochester's Cutler Building in May 1897.
Following the 1903 installation of an Arts and Crafts exhibition at Rochester's Mechanics Institute, Harvey Ellis relocated to Syracuse, N.Y., where he began writing - and illustrating - for Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman on Arts and Crafts architecture and interiors. Some of the renderings which accompanied these articles influenced the furniture produced by Stickley. Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904, at the age of 52. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
Source: https://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=871
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-WIFE AND ADOPTED SON
Through the years certain parts of the biography of Harvey Ellis have been clarified -- although some important gaps still remain -- but his wife has remained largely in the historical shadows. Data for the 1900 United States census recorded on June 14 of that year reveal her first name, Alice, and 1860 as the date of her birth and, by inference, 1885 as the year of her marriage, no documentation of which has yet been located.
When the Ellises were in Minneapolis they had adopted a child, and Ellis could have been supporting both a wife and a child then living apart from him. They named the child, a boy then about four years old, Charles Hayden Ellis and called him Charlie, which possibly honored Ellis' younger brother and former business partner Charles. One speculates that Hayden might have been his wife's maiden name. The paper reported that the boy's last name was Nicholson and that he had been born in Indianapolis and placed for adoption in Sheltering Arms of that city. No adoption record in Indianapolis has been located. However, there was also a reference to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis, a more likely source, since Ellis had no known connection with Indianapolis. The archives of Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis yielded the name of Leonard Mickelson who was one and a half years old when he was admitted on October 1, 1884. He was placed "on trial for adoption" on April 23, 1888 with unidentified people. Considering the age of the child, the date of placement, the phonetic similarity between Nicholson and Mickelson, the possible confusion between Indianapolis and Minneapolis, and the often careless, inaccurate reporting in these Post Dispatch articles, very likely Leonard Mickelson's adoptive parents were Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Ellis.
It has not been possible to establish an exact calendar of happenings or determine where husband and wife were at certain times as events in St. Louis unfolded during the next four months, and what follows may need future correction. Soon after arriving in St. Louis Mrs. Ellis and Charlie moved from the Garfield Hotel to a boarding house. Other residents and servants observed her habitual mistreatment of the boy, then about six years old, which culminated at some point in June in her leaving the child alone while she traveled to St. Joseph. Because Ellis also was either out of town, according to his employer George Mann, or "on a spree" -- more of that later -- according to Mrs. Ellis in a subsequent police interview, Mann intervened and took the child to the central police station. Mann and a police sergeant then sought to place Charlie in the St. Joseph Asylum, a facility for indigent or abandoned children as well as for juvenile delinquents. However, because neither parent was available to sign necessary paperwork, on June 16 Charlie temporarily went to the House of Refuge, a residence for widows and orphans. Within the next week or so he was released at Mann's request to, rather amazingly, Mrs. Ellis who by then was back in St. Louis.
About a month later, on July 21, she asked a colored [Post Dispatch usage] washerwoman named Josie Bates, who worked at her lodgings, to take the child for a week, giving strict instructions that he was not to have any contact with whites [Post Dispatch usage]. Two days later Mrs. Ellis told Mrs. Bass that she never wanted to see the child again and left a bundle of clothing for him. She then moved to a different boarding house and effectively disappeared. Because someone reported to the police that a colored woman was keeping a white child secluded in her house, Mrs. Bass was interviewed by a neighborhood patrolman. The second abandonment was thus revealed, and Charlie again was taken to the central police station, from where a court matron then took charge of him. On July 27 Mrs. Ellis was located, another investigation ensued, and the next day Ellis was summoned to the station; he arrived intoxicated. Told to return the following day, he instead left for St. Joseph. Again Mann became involved in the matter, but, inexplicably, so did the police chief and the mayor of St. Louis. On August 5, accompanied by Charlie, the court matron personally took a report about the situation from the police chief, dated that day, to the mayor and told him she had located an affluent childless couple who were willing to take the boy. The mayor ostensibly ordered her to temporarily place the child with them.
The next day, August 6, a story headlined: "Gave The Child Away/ Mrs. Harry Ellis's Disposition Of Her Six-Year-Old Son/ Given To A Colored Woman Under Mysterious Circumstances" appeared on an inner page of the paper. The fact that Mrs. Ellis's husband Harry was an architect working for Mann on the new city hall did not seem to resonate that day with the reporter. However, by the following day Harry Ellis had been identified as Harvey Ellis, and the story had jumped to the lead position on the front page with a large-font headline that proclaimed "Little Charlie Ellis/ Twice Abandoned In A Great City By His Parents." The story of the previous day was retold in somewhat garbled fashion.
A day after the front-page story, another murky element was added by an article on an inner page headlined: "What Did She Mean?/ Architect Mann Unable To Understand Mrs. Harvey Ellis' Statements." She apparently had publicly said that Mann and city politicians were to blame for "all the trouble." Mann responded only with:
"I do not think that at this time the woman is fully responsible for all she says, as she has had much trouble lately. We all thought that the condition of affairs would improve if we got the two [Harvey and his wife] separated. Ellis has, I know, a good reason for not living with the woman and I hope that matters will all be quieted down, as he is one of the best draughtsmen in the country and capable of doing a great deal of good work."
It is a given that no responsible adult in her right mind, even an abusive adoptive mother, would leave a six-year-old child alone while she went out of town. However, all evidence to date points to the fact that Mrs. Ellis was not a responsible adult, and indeed one of the subheadings in the story about giving Charlie to the washerwoman proclaimed "Mrs. Ellis Is Ill." After that incident she was diagnosed with severe nervous excitement and entered the Mullanphy Hospital. There her actions led to the conclusion that she was insane -- it is necessary to keep in mind that insanity in the 1890s described a range of conditions that would be given other diagnoses today. After release from the hospital, she returned to her lodgings and recovered to some degree but was described as still being very ill.
Ellis reluctantly relinquished Charlie only after unsuccessfully asking his brother Charles, living in Rochester with his wife and infant daughter, to take him when it was apparent that Mrs. Ellis could not or would not care for him. There is no further word of the child until half a year later when the Post Dispatch reported that he had been returned, at an unspecified time, to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis. Although the adoption record there had noted that it was a trial adoption, to date no record of Charlie's return has been located. One wonders if he really had been quickly placed with an unidentified affluent couple, or had that been just a statement to the press intended for some reason to remove him from the spotlight and thereby dampen public interest in the situation? Whatever the case, one can only hope that the rest of Charlie's life became more settled and happier than his first six years had been.
As many sensational stories often do, the one about Charlie also soon faded away, although about three weeks later it was summarized, very briefly, in an article whose main purpose was to report that the Ellises had legally separated -- again, why would this have been of interest to the public? It noted that "Mr. Ellis will contribute a stipulated sum to his wife's support, but they will not undertake living together again."
That would seem to have ended the marital history of the Ellises in St. Louis, but there is more to the story. As pieced together from the two September 1893 Post Dispatch articles, after the publicity about Charlie, Mrs. Ellis became addicted to morphine and the sedative chloral hydrate. One wonders of course if drugs might have played a part in her earlier aberrant mistreatment of the child. Whatever the case, concerned about his presumably estranged wife's addiction, Ellis thought a visit to her mother in Rochester might be good for her. The exact time of her visit and how long she was in Rochester are not known -- it could have been days, weeks or months at anytime during the previous three years. That Ellis regularly sent her part of his wages "all the time," as he had agreed to do three years earlier, suggests that her stay might have been lengthy.
On August 25, 1893 Ellis also was in Rochester, for on that day he signed and dated a plein-air pencil sketch of a scene in Brighton, a Rochester suburb. Possibly he was there to visit his wife, possibly her family had summoned him, possibly he had come to retrieve her. Whatever the circumstances, shortly thereafter they both returned to St. Louis, apparently separately. Once back, she accused Ellis of living with another woman during her absence. He denied it, and his office colleagues said that she had become morbidly jealous, repeatedly accusing him of being involved with other women. There was another quarrel, and on the morning of September 7, 1893 she attempted suicide by ingesting a large but not lethal dose of chloral hydrate that she had bought at a drugstore -- these were the days when powerful sedatives seemed to be rather casually available and daily newspapers openly advertised for sale other products such as, for example, Tincture of Opium. It resulted in deep sleep rather than death. That too became sensational front page fodder headlined in even larger font than previously used for the story about Charlie, "Was Jealous/ Draughtsman Harvey Ellis' Wife Takes A Dose Of Poison./ She Claimed Her Husband Thought More Of Another Woman/ Her Jealously Alleged To Have No Genuine Foundation."
Surprisingly, in view of the legal separation, her suicide attempt apparently happened in Ellis's presence at the Garfield Hotel, where he had been living ever since coming to St. Louis three years earlier. Shocked and too upset to function -- or was it just possibly that he wanted to avoid the press that seemed to be ever-present in St. Louis when events concerned him? -- he called his friend George Siemens at work. Siemens ran to the nearby City Hall Dispensary to have an ambulance dispatched to the Garfield Hotel. He went with it to the hotel and accompanied Mrs. Ellis back to the Dispensary, remaining there while her stomach was pumped. Immediately after that, a reporter was allowed to question her before she was taken to the City Hospital. She told him she was living at the hotel with her husband. Siemens then terminated the interview. Later Ellis went to her at the hospital, The next day's headline was "Sorry She Did It." That morning when she was interviewed before being discharged from the hospital, a reporter -- the press again -- described her as a "frail little woman." She talked to him in rambling fashion about family troubles and other unspecified subjects for half an hour. The reporter judged her "not responsible for her behaviour," and doctors at the hospital thought that her mind was "in a measure unbalanced." When asked where she was going from the hospital, she said:
"Back to Harvey; he always supports me, even if he does love another woman better than he does me. He is a pretty good follow [even] if he does drink sometimes, and I am going back to him right away."
One can only speculate that compassion, affection and love existed -- perhaps submerged from time to time -- along with periodic exasperation and, eventually, a religious faith that decried divorce. How else can their on-again/off-again relationship that continued in Rochester for the next decade, that is for the rest of Harvey Ellis' life, be explained?
Source: http://harveyellisfacts.blogspot.com/2010/11/mrs.html
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The University of Minnesota survived its early hardships with financial assistance from two primary sources: businessman, governor, and philanthropist John S. Pillsbury, who became a member of the University's Board of Regents in 1863; and the federal government's Morrill Act, passed in 1862. These two came to the forefront in the 1880s, when the Minnesota State Legislature accused the University of diverting Morrill Act funds from the agricultural college to other parts of the University. As a result, the state government threatened to divide the two into separate institutions, which would have severely hampered the University's access to federal funding and subsequent growth.
While these developments were occurring, construction had begun on a new Science Hall in 1887, which would house the applied sciences. However, a fire severely damaged the building when it was halfway finished, and the University requested $150,000 from the legislature to salvage the project. Having already committed $100,000, the state was unwilling to pledge any more money, so Mr. Pillsbury stepped in to save Science Hall. He provided all of the $150,000 in a deal that would keep the agricultural college and University together, thereby securing the future of the school. For Pillsbury's efforts, the University changed the building's name from Science Hall to Pillsbury Hall.
Pillsbury commissioned the local architect Leroy S. Buffington to design the new building. Buffington had previously designed Pillsbury's "A" Mill, as well as the University's Eddy Hall. However, Buffington's employee Harvey Ellis was actually responsible for the building's design. Ellis became known for bringing the Richardsonian Romanesque style to Minnesota, and he based Pillsbury Hall on Harvard's famous Sever Hall. In addition to Richardsonian Romanesque, Ellis also incorporated elements of the Prairie School, English Arts and Crafts, Gothic, and Victorian architectural styles.
The 30,000- square-foot structure is made of yellow and red sandstone, both quarried from Minnesota. The main center section is a square, with two horizontal wings on each side, and there is a distinctive off-set tower near the front entrance arches. Different carvings dot the building, depicting gargoyles, Medusa, and sea serpents, among other figures. However, these intricate designs (as well as the sandstone's original colors) were concealed over the years by soot from a nearby heating plant. It wasn't until 1985 that the exterior of the building was extensively cleaned, and its impressive features were returned to their original state.
For a brief period in the 1920s, the University's health center was located in the Pillsbury Hall basement. For most of its history, the rest of the building was home to different scientific disciplines, including zoology, botany, and geology. However, most of these departments moved to other buildings over the years, and in 2017 the only remaining department (Geology and Geophysics) finally left the building.
Since the 1990s, the Department of English had been trying to relocate to Pillsbury Hall, and their dream finally started becoming a reality in 2018. That year, the state legislature passed a bill that would fund a major renovation of Pillsbury Hall, since its interior was long overdue for an upgrade. The new design is catered to the English Department, and includes space for classrooms, offices, magazine production, and even a performance space in the attic. Acclaimed Minneapolis artist Seitu-Jones was recently selected to create a piece for the updated building, and construction is expected to be complete in the summer of 2021.
SOURCE- Gronseth, Adrian. "Pillsbury Hall." Clio: Your Guide to History. April 14, 2020. Accessed January 27, 2023. https://www.theclio.com/tour/1312/8
Sources
State Historic Preservation Office Staff. National Register of Historic Places Inventory -- Nomination Form, National Park Service. August 23rd 1984. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/33466d89-64c2-4ea4-9bd8-1b3f574c3c96.
Pillsbury Hall, University of Minnesota -- Earth & Environmental Sciences . Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.esci.umn.edu/facilities/pillsbury.
Pillsbury Hall Renovation, University of Minnesota -- College of Liberal Arts. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://cla.umn.edu/pillsbury-hall-renovation.
Bierschbach, Briana. Dayton Signs Minnesota Public Works Spending Bill Despite 'Concerns', MPR News. May 30th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/05/30/dayton-signs-minn-public-works-bill-despite-concerns.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 5th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-tuesdays-primary-als-ice-bucket-follow-reporter-panel/.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 12th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-macys-future-pillsbury-hall-attic-presidential-politics/.
Pillsbury Hall -- University of Minnesota, Historic Twin Cities. October 29th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. http://www.historictwincities.com/2018/10/29/pillsbury-hall-university-of-minnesota/.
Nelson, Rick. Pillsbury Hall, U's Second-Oldest Building, in Line for $36 Million in TLC, Star Tribune. September 15th 2017. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.startribune.com/pillsbury-hall-u-s-second-oldest-building-in-line-for-36-million-in-tlc/444688963/.
Additional Information
The National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the Old Campus Historic District, which includes Pillsbury Hall
The University page with information and updates about the ongoing Pillsbury Hall renovation
Painter, illustrator, architect, furniture designer; one of the founders of the Rochester Art Club (1877) and the Rochester Society of Arts and Crafts (1897).
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HARVEY ELLIS, ARTIST, DEAD
His Body at Syracuse Morgue Unclaimed and Unidentified For Days
SYRACUSE, N. Y., Jan 11.- Harvey Ellis an artist and architect of reputation, was buried in this city to-day at the expense of acquaintances. He died at a hospital a week ago Saturday, and, until yesterday, his body lay at a morgue unclaimed.
When his identity became known, men who knew him at once arranged the burial. Bishop Thomas Hendrick of Rochester, his friend, was to conduct the services, but was unable to attend, and a local priest officiated. Only a score of persons was present.
Mr. Ellis had three pictures called Silhouettes at the Paris Exposition and also at the Pan American (Exposition). His paintings in the exhibits of the American Water Color Society at the National Academy of Design are well known among artists. He had a wife, from whom he was separated, and a brother said to be in the Middletown Asylum.
Mrr. Ellis was born in Rochester in 1852. He studied under Edwin White of the National Academy and exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1900. He was a member of the New York Water Color Club and President of the Rochester Society of Arts and Crafts. He was also an architect.
SOURCE- New York Times, January 12, 1904
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From a Rochester, NY newspaper:
Death of Harvey Ellis
Harvey Ellis, formerly a resident of Rochester and a well-known architect, died Sunday night in St. Joseph's Hospital, Syracuse, aged 53 years. Besides his wife he leaves one brother, Charles S. Ellis.
Mr. Ellis was born in Albany and was educated at West Point. After leaving college he went to New York, where he began the study of architecture. Leaving that city he came to Rochester and entered business with his brother, with whom he remained for several years, when he went West.
Mr. Ellis returned to this city several years later and again entered business with his brother. Last year he went to Syracuse, where he became associated with Gustave Stickley, (as) an architect. He had been prominently connected with "The Craftsman", an art magazine.
Mr. Ellis was the first winner of the Grant tomb competition. Among artists and architects he ranked very high and was spoken of by the "American Architect" as being one of the three great architects of the country.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904), architect, artist and craftsman, designed several buildings in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN. He was an illustrator for The Craftsman and a designer of furniture for Gustav Stickley.
Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of four children of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis. Even as a child, Ellis had an interest in the arts and the collection includes several of his early drawings. Believing that Harvey needed more discipline, his father arranged for him to enter West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was discharged on January 12, 1872 for tardiness, personal untidiness and gross neglect in his French assignments. There is also some indication that Ellis's downfall was the result of a forbidden affaire d'amour with an actress. Soon after the expulsion from West Point, Ellis's father sent him to Europe.
His marriage annulled, his future uncertain, and exiled in Europe, Ellis developed a passion for painting that he would pursue for the rest of his life. His time in Europe was not long, and in 1872 he returned to his family, now living in Albany, NY. Family relationships were soon strained and Ellis moved to New York in 1875 where he was employed by an engineering office and studied architecture under Arthur G. Gilman. Dissatisfied by this static position, Ellis left New York in 1877 for Albany where he met and grew to admire the architect Henry H. Richardson, whose Romanesque style inspired Ellis's later work.
Ellis accompanied his family when they returned to Rochester in September, 1877. Shortly thereafter he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful and Harvey Ellis was able to spend his time designing while Charles Ellis attracted new clients. Many commercial and residential buildings were designed by the office, the most important commission being for the new Federal Building (now Rochester City Hall) built in the Romanesque style.
In 1885 mounting friction between the Ellis Brothers prompted Harvey to move once again, first to Utica, NY then to St. Paul, MN. In 1886-87 he was employed as a drafsman by the St. Paul firms of J. Walter Stevens, Mould & McNichol, and Leroy S. Buffington. Buffington claimed to be the originator of the metal skeleton frame that made building tall structures feasible and he took out a patent on the process. His claim to be the inventor of the skyscraper was refuted, but using the designs created by Harvey Ellis, Buffington is credited with playing a pivotal role in refining the new method of construction.
Ellis continued to design houses, churches, banks and public buildings (many never built) for Buffington and submit renderings to architectural offices in St. Paul, St. Louis, MO and other Midwestern, and perhaps Southwestern, cities. He returned to Rochester in 1894 and rejoined his brother's firm. At some point he was married and lived in a rooming house on Lake Avenue with his wife. The economic depression meant fewer architectural commissions, but Ellis found employment decorating interiors.
Ellis's appreciation of the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement is apparent in the designs he created during this period. He was a founding member and president of the Rochester Arts & Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. In 1894 he helped organize the Society's first exhibition, a display of Japanese prints and modern French posters.
In 1903 Harvey Ellis made the arrangements to display in Rochester's Mechanics Institute an extensive exhibition of arts and crafts decorative arts. The display was organized by Gustav Stickley and first shown the previous year in Syracuse. Following the exhibition Harvey Ellis, now separated from his wife, moved to Syracuse at the invitation of Stickley to write for The Craftsman. Ellis published several articles that included his designs for arts and crafts homes and interiors. Ellis's use of curves and inlays brought a more elegant and lighter style to Stickley's "mission" furniture.
Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904 at the age of 52 due, in part to acute alcoholism. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904) architect, artist and craftsman, was one of the foremost architectural renderers of his time and a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement. Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis' four children. Despite the boy's evident artistic nature and talent, Ellis' father arranged for him to enter the U. S. Military Academy at West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was among 15 cadets discharged less than seven months later for academic insufficiency.
There is little documentation of the next six years of Ellis' life. What few facts have been uncovered indicate that he spent some time in New York and Albany before returning to Rochester in early September 1877. He was a founder of the Rochester Art Club on September 5, 1877, and quickly gained recognition as a painter. In early 1879, he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful from the start, producing designs for many commercial and residential buildings in and around Rochester.
Details of Ellis' location and activities are once again scant for most of 1885-86. He is known to have been in Rochester early in 1885 and to have married there, while he submitted a competition entry for a statue of Ulysses Grant from Utica, New York, in the fall. From 1886-1893, Ellis worked for a number of architectural firms throughout the Midwest. These included: Charles Mould and then J. Walter Stevens in St. Paul, Minnesota; Leroy Buffington and Orff & Orff in Minneapolis; Eckel and Mann in St. Joseph, Missouri; and George Mann and Randall, Ellis and Baker in St. Louis. Ellis returned to Rochester in 1893 and rejoined architectural practice with his brother but was deeply immersed in his painting and in the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1897, Ellis, Claude Bragdon, and M. Louise Stowell were founding members of the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. The Society's first exhibition, of Japanese prints and French posters, was held at Rochester's Cutler Building in May 1897.
Following the 1903 installation of an Arts and Crafts exhibition at Rochester's Mechanics Institute, Harvey Ellis relocated to Syracuse, N.Y., where he began writing - and illustrating - for Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman on Arts and Crafts architecture and interiors. Some of the renderings which accompanied these articles influenced the furniture produced by Stickley. Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904, at the age of 52. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
Source: https://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=871
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-WIFE AND ADOPTED SON
Through the years certain parts of the biography of Harvey Ellis have been clarified -- although some important gaps still remain -- but his wife has remained largely in the historical shadows. Data for the 1900 United States census recorded on June 14 of that year reveal her first name, Alice, and 1860 as the date of her birth and, by inference, 1885 as the year of her marriage, no documentation of which has yet been located.
When the Ellises were in Minneapolis they had adopted a child, and Ellis could have been supporting both a wife and a child then living apart from him. They named the child, a boy then about four years old, Charles Hayden Ellis and called him Charlie, which possibly honored Ellis' younger brother and former business partner Charles. One speculates that Hayden might have been his wife's maiden name. The paper reported that the boy's last name was Nicholson and that he had been born in Indianapolis and placed for adoption in Sheltering Arms of that city. No adoption record in Indianapolis has been located. However, there was also a reference to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis, a more likely source, since Ellis had no known connection with Indianapolis. The archives of Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis yielded the name of Leonard Mickelson who was one and a half years old when he was admitted on October 1, 1884. He was placed "on trial for adoption" on April 23, 1888 with unidentified people. Considering the age of the child, the date of placement, the phonetic similarity between Nicholson and Mickelson, the possible confusion between Indianapolis and Minneapolis, and the often careless, inaccurate reporting in these Post Dispatch articles, very likely Leonard Mickelson's adoptive parents were Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Ellis.
It has not been possible to establish an exact calendar of happenings or determine where husband and wife were at certain times as events in St. Louis unfolded during the next four months, and what follows may need future correction. Soon after arriving in St. Louis Mrs. Ellis and Charlie moved from the Garfield Hotel to a boarding house. Other residents and servants observed her habitual mistreatment of the boy, then about six years old, which culminated at some point in June in her leaving the child alone while she traveled to St. Joseph. Because Ellis also was either out of town, according to his employer George Mann, or "on a spree" -- more of that later -- according to Mrs. Ellis in a subsequent police interview, Mann intervened and took the child to the central police station. Mann and a police sergeant then sought to place Charlie in the St. Joseph Asylum, a facility for indigent or abandoned children as well as for juvenile delinquents. However, because neither parent was available to sign necessary paperwork, on June 16 Charlie temporarily went to the House of Refuge, a residence for widows and orphans. Within the next week or so he was released at Mann's request to, rather amazingly, Mrs. Ellis who by then was back in St. Louis.
About a month later, on July 21, she asked a colored [Post Dispatch usage] washerwoman named Josie Bates, who worked at her lodgings, to take the child for a week, giving strict instructions that he was not to have any contact with whites [Post Dispatch usage]. Two days later Mrs. Ellis told Mrs. Bass that she never wanted to see the child again and left a bundle of clothing for him. She then moved to a different boarding house and effectively disappeared. Because someone reported to the police that a colored woman was keeping a white child secluded in her house, Mrs. Bass was interviewed by a neighborhood patrolman. The second abandonment was thus revealed, and Charlie again was taken to the central police station, from where a court matron then took charge of him. On July 27 Mrs. Ellis was located, another investigation ensued, and the next day Ellis was summoned to the station; he arrived intoxicated. Told to return the following day, he instead left for St. Joseph. Again Mann became involved in the matter, but, inexplicably, so did the police chief and the mayor of St. Louis. On August 5, accompanied by Charlie, the court matron personally took a report about the situation from the police chief, dated that day, to the mayor and told him she had located an affluent childless couple who were willing to take the boy. The mayor ostensibly ordered her to temporarily place the child with them.
The next day, August 6, a story headlined: "Gave The Child Away/ Mrs. Harry Ellis's Disposition Of Her Six-Year-Old Son/ Given To A Colored Woman Under Mysterious Circumstances" appeared on an inner page of the paper. The fact that Mrs. Ellis's husband Harry was an architect working for Mann on the new city hall did not seem to resonate that day with the reporter. However, by the following day Harry Ellis had been identified as Harvey Ellis, and the story had jumped to the lead position on the front page with a large-font headline that proclaimed "Little Charlie Ellis/ Twice Abandoned In A Great City By His Parents." The story of the previous day was retold in somewhat garbled fashion.
A day after the front-page story, another murky element was added by an article on an inner page headlined: "What Did She Mean?/ Architect Mann Unable To Understand Mrs. Harvey Ellis' Statements." She apparently had publicly said that Mann and city politicians were to blame for "all the trouble." Mann responded only with:
"I do not think that at this time the woman is fully responsible for all she says, as she has had much trouble lately. We all thought that the condition of affairs would improve if we got the two [Harvey and his wife] separated. Ellis has, I know, a good reason for not living with the woman and I hope that matters will all be quieted down, as he is one of the best draughtsmen in the country and capable of doing a great deal of good work."
It is a given that no responsible adult in her right mind, even an abusive adoptive mother, would leave a six-year-old child alone while she went out of town. However, all evidence to date points to the fact that Mrs. Ellis was not a responsible adult, and indeed one of the subheadings in the story about giving Charlie to the washerwoman proclaimed "Mrs. Ellis Is Ill." After that incident she was diagnosed with severe nervous excitement and entered the Mullanphy Hospital. There her actions led to the conclusion that she was insane -- it is necessary to keep in mind that insanity in the 1890s described a range of conditions that would be given other diagnoses today. After release from the hospital, she returned to her lodgings and recovered to some degree but was described as still being very ill.
Ellis reluctantly relinquished Charlie only after unsuccessfully asking his brother Charles, living in Rochester with his wife and infant daughter, to take him when it was apparent that Mrs. Ellis could not or would not care for him. There is no further word of the child until half a year later when the Post Dispatch reported that he had been returned, at an unspecified time, to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis. Although the adoption record there had noted that it was a trial adoption, to date no record of Charlie's return has been located. One wonders if he really had been quickly placed with an unidentified affluent couple, or had that been just a statement to the press intended for some reason to remove him from the spotlight and thereby dampen public interest in the situation? Whatever the case, one can only hope that the rest of Charlie's life became more settled and happier than his first six years had been.
As many sensational stories often do, the one about Charlie also soon faded away, although about three weeks later it was summarized, very briefly, in an article whose main purpose was to report that the Ellises had legally separated -- again, why would this have been of interest to the public? It noted that "Mr. Ellis will contribute a stipulated sum to his wife's support, but they will not undertake living together again."
That would seem to have ended the marital history of the Ellises in St. Louis, but there is more to the story. As pieced together from the two September 1893 Post Dispatch articles, after the publicity about Charlie, Mrs. Ellis became addicted to morphine and the sedative chloral hydrate. One wonders of course if drugs might have played a part in her earlier aberrant mistreatment of the child. Whatever the case, concerned about his presumably estranged wife's addiction, Ellis thought a visit to her mother in Rochester might be good for her. The exact time of her visit and how long she was in Rochester are not known -- it could have been days, weeks or months at anytime during the previous three years. That Ellis regularly sent her part of his wages "all the time," as he had agreed to do three years earlier, suggests that her stay might have been lengthy.
On August 25, 1893 Ellis also was in Rochester, for on that day he signed and dated a plein-air pencil sketch of a scene in Brighton, a Rochester suburb. Possibly he was there to visit his wife, possibly her family had summoned him, possibly he had come to retrieve her. Whatever the circumstances, shortly thereafter they both returned to St. Louis, apparently separately. Once back, she accused Ellis of living with another woman during her absence. He denied it, and his office colleagues said that she had become morbidly jealous, repeatedly accusing him of being involved with other women. There was another quarrel, and on the morning of September 7, 1893 she attempted suicide by ingesting a large but not lethal dose of chloral hydrate that she had bought at a drugstore -- these were the days when powerful sedatives seemed to be rather casually available and daily newspapers openly advertised for sale other products such as, for example, Tincture of Opium. It resulted in deep sleep rather than death. That too became sensational front page fodder headlined in even larger font than previously used for the story about Charlie, "Was Jealous/ Draughtsman Harvey Ellis' Wife Takes A Dose Of Poison./ She Claimed Her Husband Thought More Of Another Woman/ Her Jealously Alleged To Have No Genuine Foundation."
Surprisingly, in view of the legal separation, her suicide attempt apparently happened in Ellis's presence at the Garfield Hotel, where he had been living ever since coming to St. Louis three years earlier. Shocked and too upset to function -- or was it just possibly that he wanted to avoid the press that seemed to be ever-present in St. Louis when events concerned him? -- he called his friend George Siemens at work. Siemens ran to the nearby City Hall Dispensary to have an ambulance dispatched to the Garfield Hotel. He went with it to the hotel and accompanied Mrs. Ellis back to the Dispensary, remaining there while her stomach was pumped. Immediately after that, a reporter was allowed to question her before she was taken to the City Hospital. She told him she was living at the hotel with her husband. Siemens then terminated the interview. Later Ellis went to her at the hospital, The next day's headline was "Sorry She Did It." That morning when she was interviewed before being discharged from the hospital, a reporter -- the press again -- described her as a "frail little woman." She talked to him in rambling fashion about family troubles and other unspecified subjects for half an hour. The reporter judged her "not responsible for her behaviour," and doctors at the hospital thought that her mind was "in a measure unbalanced." When asked where she was going from the hospital, she said:
"Back to Harvey; he always supports me, even if he does love another woman better than he does me. He is a pretty good follow [even] if he does drink sometimes, and I am going back to him right away."
One can only speculate that compassion, affection and love existed -- perhaps submerged from time to time -- along with periodic exasperation and, eventually, a religious faith that decried divorce. How else can their on-again/off-again relationship that continued in Rochester for the next decade, that is for the rest of Harvey Ellis' life, be explained?
Source: http://harveyellisfacts.blogspot.com/2010/11/mrs.html
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The University of Minnesota survived its early hardships with financial assistance from two primary sources: businessman, governor, and philanthropist John S. Pillsbury, who became a member of the University's Board of Regents in 1863; and the federal government's Morrill Act, passed in 1862. These two came to the forefront in the 1880s, when the Minnesota State Legislature accused the University of diverting Morrill Act funds from the agricultural college to other parts of the University. As a result, the state government threatened to divide the two into separate institutions, which would have severely hampered the University's access to federal funding and subsequent growth.
While these developments were occurring, construction had begun on a new Science Hall in 1887, which would house the applied sciences. However, a fire severely damaged the building when it was halfway finished, and the University requested $150,000 from the legislature to salvage the project. Having already committed $100,000, the state was unwilling to pledge any more money, so Mr. Pillsbury stepped in to save Science Hall. He provided all of the $150,000 in a deal that would keep the agricultural college and University together, thereby securing the future of the school. For Pillsbury's efforts, the University changed the building's name from Science Hall to Pillsbury Hall.
Pillsbury commissioned the local architect Leroy S. Buffington to design the new building. Buffington had previously designed Pillsbury's "A" Mill, as well as the University's Eddy Hall. However, Buffington's employee Harvey Ellis was actually responsible for the building's design. Ellis became known for bringing the Richardsonian Romanesque style to Minnesota, and he based Pillsbury Hall on Harvard's famous Sever Hall. In addition to Richardsonian Romanesque, Ellis also incorporated elements of the Prairie School, English Arts and Crafts, Gothic, and Victorian architectural styles.
The 30,000- square-foot structure is made of yellow and red sandstone, both quarried from Minnesota. The main center section is a square, with two horizontal wings on each side, and there is a distinctive off-set tower near the front entrance arches. Different carvings dot the building, depicting gargoyles, Medusa, and sea serpents, among other figures. However, these intricate designs (as well as the sandstone's original colors) were concealed over the years by soot from a nearby heating plant. It wasn't until 1985 that the exterior of the building was extensively cleaned, and its impressive features were returned to their original state.
For a brief period in the 1920s, the University's health center was located in the Pillsbury Hall basement. For most of its history, the rest of the building was home to different scientific disciplines, including zoology, botany, and geology. However, most of these departments moved to other buildings over the years, and in 2017 the only remaining department (Geology and Geophysics) finally left the building.
Since the 1990s, the Department of English had been trying to relocate to Pillsbury Hall, and their dream finally started becoming a reality in 2018. That year, the state legislature passed a bill that would fund a major renovation of Pillsbury Hall, since its interior was long overdue for an upgrade. The new design is catered to the English Department, and includes space for classrooms, offices, magazine production, and even a performance space in the attic. Acclaimed Minneapolis artist Seitu-Jones was recently selected to create a piece for the updated building, and construction is expected to be complete in the summer of 2021.
SOURCE- Gronseth, Adrian. "Pillsbury Hall." Clio: Your Guide to History. April 14, 2020. Accessed January 27, 2023. https://www.theclio.com/tour/1312/8
Sources
State Historic Preservation Office Staff. National Register of Historic Places Inventory -- Nomination Form, National Park Service. August 23rd 1984. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/33466d89-64c2-4ea4-9bd8-1b3f574c3c96.
Pillsbury Hall, University of Minnesota -- Earth & Environmental Sciences . Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.esci.umn.edu/facilities/pillsbury.
Pillsbury Hall Renovation, University of Minnesota -- College of Liberal Arts. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://cla.umn.edu/pillsbury-hall-renovation.
Bierschbach, Briana. Dayton Signs Minnesota Public Works Spending Bill Despite 'Concerns', MPR News. May 30th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/05/30/dayton-signs-minn-public-works-bill-despite-concerns.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 5th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-tuesdays-primary-als-ice-bucket-follow-reporter-panel/.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 12th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-macys-future-pillsbury-hall-attic-presidential-politics/.
Pillsbury Hall -- University of Minnesota, Historic Twin Cities. October 29th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. http://www.historictwincities.com/2018/10/29/pillsbury-hall-university-of-minnesota/.
Nelson, Rick. Pillsbury Hall, U's Second-Oldest Building, in Line for $36 Million in TLC, Star Tribune. September 15th 2017. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.startribune.com/pillsbury-hall-u-s-second-oldest-building-in-line-for-36-million-in-tlc/444688963/.
Additional Information
The National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the Old Campus Historic District, which includes Pillsbury Hall
The University page with information and updates about the ongoing Pillsbury Hall renovation
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HARVEY ELLIS, ARTIST, DEAD
His Body at Syracuse Morgue Unclaimed and Unidentified For Days
SYRACUSE, N. Y., Jan 11.- Harvey Ellis an artist and architect of reputation, was buried in this city to-day at the expense of acquaintances. He died at a hospital a week ago Saturday, and, until yesterday, his body lay at a morgue unclaimed.
When his identity became known, men who knew him at once arranged the burial. Bishop Thomas Hendrick of Rochester, his friend, was to conduct the services, but was unable to attend, and a local priest officiated. Only a score of persons was present.
Mr. Ellis had three pictures called Silhouettes at the Paris Exposition and also at the Pan American (Exposition). His paintings in the exhibits of the American Water Color Society at the National Academy of Design are well known among artists. He had a wife, from whom he was separated, and a brother said to be in the Middletown Asylum.
Mrr. Ellis was born in Rochester in 1852. He studied under Edwin White of the National Academy and exhibited at the Paris Exposition in 1900. He was a member of the New York Water Color Club and President of the Rochester Society of Arts and Crafts. He was also an architect.
SOURCE- New York Times, January 12, 1904
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From a Rochester, NY newspaper:
Death of Harvey Ellis
Harvey Ellis, formerly a resident of Rochester and a well-known architect, died Sunday night in St. Joseph's Hospital, Syracuse, aged 53 years. Besides his wife he leaves one brother, Charles S. Ellis.
Mr. Ellis was born in Albany and was educated at West Point. After leaving college he went to New York, where he began the study of architecture. Leaving that city he came to Rochester and entered business with his brother, with whom he remained for several years, when he went West.
Mr. Ellis returned to this city several years later and again entered business with his brother. Last year he went to Syracuse, where he became associated with Gustave Stickley, (as) an architect. He had been prominently connected with "The Craftsman", an art magazine.
Mr. Ellis was the first winner of the Grant tomb competition. Among artists and architects he ranked very high and was spoken of by the "American Architect" as being one of the three great architects of the country.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904), architect, artist and craftsman, designed several buildings in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN. He was an illustrator for The Craftsman and a designer of furniture for Gustav Stickley.
Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of four children of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis. Even as a child, Ellis had an interest in the arts and the collection includes several of his early drawings. Believing that Harvey needed more discipline, his father arranged for him to enter West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was discharged on January 12, 1872 for tardiness, personal untidiness and gross neglect in his French assignments. There is also some indication that Ellis's downfall was the result of a forbidden affaire d'amour with an actress. Soon after the expulsion from West Point, Ellis's father sent him to Europe.
His marriage annulled, his future uncertain, and exiled in Europe, Ellis developed a passion for painting that he would pursue for the rest of his life. His time in Europe was not long, and in 1872 he returned to his family, now living in Albany, NY. Family relationships were soon strained and Ellis moved to New York in 1875 where he was employed by an engineering office and studied architecture under Arthur G. Gilman. Dissatisfied by this static position, Ellis left New York in 1877 for Albany where he met and grew to admire the architect Henry H. Richardson, whose Romanesque style inspired Ellis's later work.
Ellis accompanied his family when they returned to Rochester in September, 1877. Shortly thereafter he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful and Harvey Ellis was able to spend his time designing while Charles Ellis attracted new clients. Many commercial and residential buildings were designed by the office, the most important commission being for the new Federal Building (now Rochester City Hall) built in the Romanesque style.
In 1885 mounting friction between the Ellis Brothers prompted Harvey to move once again, first to Utica, NY then to St. Paul, MN. In 1886-87 he was employed as a drafsman by the St. Paul firms of J. Walter Stevens, Mould & McNichol, and Leroy S. Buffington. Buffington claimed to be the originator of the metal skeleton frame that made building tall structures feasible and he took out a patent on the process. His claim to be the inventor of the skyscraper was refuted, but using the designs created by Harvey Ellis, Buffington is credited with playing a pivotal role in refining the new method of construction.
Ellis continued to design houses, churches, banks and public buildings (many never built) for Buffington and submit renderings to architectural offices in St. Paul, St. Louis, MO and other Midwestern, and perhaps Southwestern, cities. He returned to Rochester in 1894 and rejoined his brother's firm. At some point he was married and lived in a rooming house on Lake Avenue with his wife. The economic depression meant fewer architectural commissions, but Ellis found employment decorating interiors.
Ellis's appreciation of the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement is apparent in the designs he created during this period. He was a founding member and president of the Rochester Arts & Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. In 1894 he helped organize the Society's first exhibition, a display of Japanese prints and modern French posters.
In 1903 Harvey Ellis made the arrangements to display in Rochester's Mechanics Institute an extensive exhibition of arts and crafts decorative arts. The display was organized by Gustav Stickley and first shown the previous year in Syracuse. Following the exhibition Harvey Ellis, now separated from his wife, moved to Syracuse at the invitation of Stickley to write for The Craftsman. Ellis published several articles that included his designs for arts and crafts homes and interiors. Ellis's use of curves and inlays brought a more elegant and lighter style to Stickley's "mission" furniture.
Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904 at the age of 52 due, in part to acute alcoholism. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
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Harvey Ellis (1852-1904) architect, artist and craftsman, was one of the foremost architectural renderers of his time and a key figure in the American Arts and Crafts movement. Harvey Ellis was born in Rochester, NY, on October 17, 1852, the oldest of Dewitt and Eliza Haseltine Ellis' four children. Despite the boy's evident artistic nature and talent, Ellis' father arranged for him to enter the U. S. Military Academy at West Point on July 1, 1871. His stay at the school was brief: he was among 15 cadets discharged less than seven months later for academic insufficiency.
There is little documentation of the next six years of Ellis' life. What few facts have been uncovered indicate that he spent some time in New York and Albany before returning to Rochester in early September 1877. He was a founder of the Rochester Art Club on September 5, 1877, and quickly gained recognition as a painter. In early 1879, he and his brother Charles established the architectural office of H. & C.S. Ellis. The firm was quite successful from the start, producing designs for many commercial and residential buildings in and around Rochester.
Details of Ellis' location and activities are once again scant for most of 1885-86. He is known to have been in Rochester early in 1885 and to have married there, while he submitted a competition entry for a statue of Ulysses Grant from Utica, New York, in the fall. From 1886-1893, Ellis worked for a number of architectural firms throughout the Midwest. These included: Charles Mould and then J. Walter Stevens in St. Paul, Minnesota; Leroy Buffington and Orff & Orff in Minneapolis; Eckel and Mann in St. Joseph, Missouri; and George Mann and Randall, Ellis and Baker in St. Louis. Ellis returned to Rochester in 1893 and rejoined architectural practice with his brother but was deeply immersed in his painting and in the aesthetic principals of the Arts and Crafts movement. In 1897, Ellis, Claude Bragdon, and M. Louise Stowell were founding members of the Rochester Arts and Crafts Society, one of the earliest such organizations in the country. The Society's first exhibition, of Japanese prints and French posters, was held at Rochester's Cutler Building in May 1897.
Following the 1903 installation of an Arts and Crafts exhibition at Rochester's Mechanics Institute, Harvey Ellis relocated to Syracuse, N.Y., where he began writing - and illustrating - for Gustav Stickley's The Craftsman on Arts and Crafts architecture and interiors. Some of the renderings which accompanied these articles influenced the furniture produced by Stickley. Harvey Ellis died on January 2, 1904, at the age of 52. He was buried in an unmarked grave in St. Agnes cemetery in Syracuse. A marker was placed on the grave in 1997 by the Arts and Crafts Society of Central New York.
Source: https://www.lib.rochester.edu/index.cfm?page=871
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-WIFE AND ADOPTED SON
Through the years certain parts of the biography of Harvey Ellis have been clarified -- although some important gaps still remain -- but his wife has remained largely in the historical shadows. Data for the 1900 United States census recorded on June 14 of that year reveal her first name, Alice, and 1860 as the date of her birth and, by inference, 1885 as the year of her marriage, no documentation of which has yet been located.
When the Ellises were in Minneapolis they had adopted a child, and Ellis could have been supporting both a wife and a child then living apart from him. They named the child, a boy then about four years old, Charles Hayden Ellis and called him Charlie, which possibly honored Ellis' younger brother and former business partner Charles. One speculates that Hayden might have been his wife's maiden name. The paper reported that the boy's last name was Nicholson and that he had been born in Indianapolis and placed for adoption in Sheltering Arms of that city. No adoption record in Indianapolis has been located. However, there was also a reference to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis, a more likely source, since Ellis had no known connection with Indianapolis. The archives of Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis yielded the name of Leonard Mickelson who was one and a half years old when he was admitted on October 1, 1884. He was placed "on trial for adoption" on April 23, 1888 with unidentified people. Considering the age of the child, the date of placement, the phonetic similarity between Nicholson and Mickelson, the possible confusion between Indianapolis and Minneapolis, and the often careless, inaccurate reporting in these Post Dispatch articles, very likely Leonard Mickelson's adoptive parents were Mr. and Mrs. Harvey Ellis.
It has not been possible to establish an exact calendar of happenings or determine where husband and wife were at certain times as events in St. Louis unfolded during the next four months, and what follows may need future correction. Soon after arriving in St. Louis Mrs. Ellis and Charlie moved from the Garfield Hotel to a boarding house. Other residents and servants observed her habitual mistreatment of the boy, then about six years old, which culminated at some point in June in her leaving the child alone while she traveled to St. Joseph. Because Ellis also was either out of town, according to his employer George Mann, or "on a spree" -- more of that later -- according to Mrs. Ellis in a subsequent police interview, Mann intervened and took the child to the central police station. Mann and a police sergeant then sought to place Charlie in the St. Joseph Asylum, a facility for indigent or abandoned children as well as for juvenile delinquents. However, because neither parent was available to sign necessary paperwork, on June 16 Charlie temporarily went to the House of Refuge, a residence for widows and orphans. Within the next week or so he was released at Mann's request to, rather amazingly, Mrs. Ellis who by then was back in St. Louis.
About a month later, on July 21, she asked a colored [Post Dispatch usage] washerwoman named Josie Bates, who worked at her lodgings, to take the child for a week, giving strict instructions that he was not to have any contact with whites [Post Dispatch usage]. Two days later Mrs. Ellis told Mrs. Bass that she never wanted to see the child again and left a bundle of clothing for him. She then moved to a different boarding house and effectively disappeared. Because someone reported to the police that a colored woman was keeping a white child secluded in her house, Mrs. Bass was interviewed by a neighborhood patrolman. The second abandonment was thus revealed, and Charlie again was taken to the central police station, from where a court matron then took charge of him. On July 27 Mrs. Ellis was located, another investigation ensued, and the next day Ellis was summoned to the station; he arrived intoxicated. Told to return the following day, he instead left for St. Joseph. Again Mann became involved in the matter, but, inexplicably, so did the police chief and the mayor of St. Louis. On August 5, accompanied by Charlie, the court matron personally took a report about the situation from the police chief, dated that day, to the mayor and told him she had located an affluent childless couple who were willing to take the boy. The mayor ostensibly ordered her to temporarily place the child with them.
The next day, August 6, a story headlined: "Gave The Child Away/ Mrs. Harry Ellis's Disposition Of Her Six-Year-Old Son/ Given To A Colored Woman Under Mysterious Circumstances" appeared on an inner page of the paper. The fact that Mrs. Ellis's husband Harry was an architect working for Mann on the new city hall did not seem to resonate that day with the reporter. However, by the following day Harry Ellis had been identified as Harvey Ellis, and the story had jumped to the lead position on the front page with a large-font headline that proclaimed "Little Charlie Ellis/ Twice Abandoned In A Great City By His Parents." The story of the previous day was retold in somewhat garbled fashion.
A day after the front-page story, another murky element was added by an article on an inner page headlined: "What Did She Mean?/ Architect Mann Unable To Understand Mrs. Harvey Ellis' Statements." She apparently had publicly said that Mann and city politicians were to blame for "all the trouble." Mann responded only with:
"I do not think that at this time the woman is fully responsible for all she says, as she has had much trouble lately. We all thought that the condition of affairs would improve if we got the two [Harvey and his wife] separated. Ellis has, I know, a good reason for not living with the woman and I hope that matters will all be quieted down, as he is one of the best draughtsmen in the country and capable of doing a great deal of good work."
It is a given that no responsible adult in her right mind, even an abusive adoptive mother, would leave a six-year-old child alone while she went out of town. However, all evidence to date points to the fact that Mrs. Ellis was not a responsible adult, and indeed one of the subheadings in the story about giving Charlie to the washerwoman proclaimed "Mrs. Ellis Is Ill." After that incident she was diagnosed with severe nervous excitement and entered the Mullanphy Hospital. There her actions led to the conclusion that she was insane -- it is necessary to keep in mind that insanity in the 1890s described a range of conditions that would be given other diagnoses today. After release from the hospital, she returned to her lodgings and recovered to some degree but was described as still being very ill.
Ellis reluctantly relinquished Charlie only after unsuccessfully asking his brother Charles, living in Rochester with his wife and infant daughter, to take him when it was apparent that Mrs. Ellis could not or would not care for him. There is no further word of the child until half a year later when the Post Dispatch reported that he had been returned, at an unspecified time, to Sheltering Arms in Minneapolis. Although the adoption record there had noted that it was a trial adoption, to date no record of Charlie's return has been located. One wonders if he really had been quickly placed with an unidentified affluent couple, or had that been just a statement to the press intended for some reason to remove him from the spotlight and thereby dampen public interest in the situation? Whatever the case, one can only hope that the rest of Charlie's life became more settled and happier than his first six years had been.
As many sensational stories often do, the one about Charlie also soon faded away, although about three weeks later it was summarized, very briefly, in an article whose main purpose was to report that the Ellises had legally separated -- again, why would this have been of interest to the public? It noted that "Mr. Ellis will contribute a stipulated sum to his wife's support, but they will not undertake living together again."
That would seem to have ended the marital history of the Ellises in St. Louis, but there is more to the story. As pieced together from the two September 1893 Post Dispatch articles, after the publicity about Charlie, Mrs. Ellis became addicted to morphine and the sedative chloral hydrate. One wonders of course if drugs might have played a part in her earlier aberrant mistreatment of the child. Whatever the case, concerned about his presumably estranged wife's addiction, Ellis thought a visit to her mother in Rochester might be good for her. The exact time of her visit and how long she was in Rochester are not known -- it could have been days, weeks or months at anytime during the previous three years. That Ellis regularly sent her part of his wages "all the time," as he had agreed to do three years earlier, suggests that her stay might have been lengthy.
On August 25, 1893 Ellis also was in Rochester, for on that day he signed and dated a plein-air pencil sketch of a scene in Brighton, a Rochester suburb. Possibly he was there to visit his wife, possibly her family had summoned him, possibly he had come to retrieve her. Whatever the circumstances, shortly thereafter they both returned to St. Louis, apparently separately. Once back, she accused Ellis of living with another woman during her absence. He denied it, and his office colleagues said that she had become morbidly jealous, repeatedly accusing him of being involved with other women. There was another quarrel, and on the morning of September 7, 1893 she attempted suicide by ingesting a large but not lethal dose of chloral hydrate that she had bought at a drugstore -- these were the days when powerful sedatives seemed to be rather casually available and daily newspapers openly advertised for sale other products such as, for example, Tincture of Opium. It resulted in deep sleep rather than death. That too became sensational front page fodder headlined in even larger font than previously used for the story about Charlie, "Was Jealous/ Draughtsman Harvey Ellis' Wife Takes A Dose Of Poison./ She Claimed Her Husband Thought More Of Another Woman/ Her Jealously Alleged To Have No Genuine Foundation."
Surprisingly, in view of the legal separation, her suicide attempt apparently happened in Ellis's presence at the Garfield Hotel, where he had been living ever since coming to St. Louis three years earlier. Shocked and too upset to function -- or was it just possibly that he wanted to avoid the press that seemed to be ever-present in St. Louis when events concerned him? -- he called his friend George Siemens at work. Siemens ran to the nearby City Hall Dispensary to have an ambulance dispatched to the Garfield Hotel. He went with it to the hotel and accompanied Mrs. Ellis back to the Dispensary, remaining there while her stomach was pumped. Immediately after that, a reporter was allowed to question her before she was taken to the City Hospital. She told him she was living at the hotel with her husband. Siemens then terminated the interview. Later Ellis went to her at the hospital, The next day's headline was "Sorry She Did It." That morning when she was interviewed before being discharged from the hospital, a reporter -- the press again -- described her as a "frail little woman." She talked to him in rambling fashion about family troubles and other unspecified subjects for half an hour. The reporter judged her "not responsible for her behaviour," and doctors at the hospital thought that her mind was "in a measure unbalanced." When asked where she was going from the hospital, she said:
"Back to Harvey; he always supports me, even if he does love another woman better than he does me. He is a pretty good follow [even] if he does drink sometimes, and I am going back to him right away."
One can only speculate that compassion, affection and love existed -- perhaps submerged from time to time -- along with periodic exasperation and, eventually, a religious faith that decried divorce. How else can their on-again/off-again relationship that continued in Rochester for the next decade, that is for the rest of Harvey Ellis' life, be explained?
Source: http://harveyellisfacts.blogspot.com/2010/11/mrs.html
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The University of Minnesota survived its early hardships with financial assistance from two primary sources: businessman, governor, and philanthropist John S. Pillsbury, who became a member of the University's Board of Regents in 1863; and the federal government's Morrill Act, passed in 1862. These two came to the forefront in the 1880s, when the Minnesota State Legislature accused the University of diverting Morrill Act funds from the agricultural college to other parts of the University. As a result, the state government threatened to divide the two into separate institutions, which would have severely hampered the University's access to federal funding and subsequent growth.
While these developments were occurring, construction had begun on a new Science Hall in 1887, which would house the applied sciences. However, a fire severely damaged the building when it was halfway finished, and the University requested $150,000 from the legislature to salvage the project. Having already committed $100,000, the state was unwilling to pledge any more money, so Mr. Pillsbury stepped in to save Science Hall. He provided all of the $150,000 in a deal that would keep the agricultural college and University together, thereby securing the future of the school. For Pillsbury's efforts, the University changed the building's name from Science Hall to Pillsbury Hall.
Pillsbury commissioned the local architect Leroy S. Buffington to design the new building. Buffington had previously designed Pillsbury's "A" Mill, as well as the University's Eddy Hall. However, Buffington's employee Harvey Ellis was actually responsible for the building's design. Ellis became known for bringing the Richardsonian Romanesque style to Minnesota, and he based Pillsbury Hall on Harvard's famous Sever Hall. In addition to Richardsonian Romanesque, Ellis also incorporated elements of the Prairie School, English Arts and Crafts, Gothic, and Victorian architectural styles.
The 30,000- square-foot structure is made of yellow and red sandstone, both quarried from Minnesota. The main center section is a square, with two horizontal wings on each side, and there is a distinctive off-set tower near the front entrance arches. Different carvings dot the building, depicting gargoyles, Medusa, and sea serpents, among other figures. However, these intricate designs (as well as the sandstone's original colors) were concealed over the years by soot from a nearby heating plant. It wasn't until 1985 that the exterior of the building was extensively cleaned, and its impressive features were returned to their original state.
For a brief period in the 1920s, the University's health center was located in the Pillsbury Hall basement. For most of its history, the rest of the building was home to different scientific disciplines, including zoology, botany, and geology. However, most of these departments moved to other buildings over the years, and in 2017 the only remaining department (Geology and Geophysics) finally left the building.
Since the 1990s, the Department of English had been trying to relocate to Pillsbury Hall, and their dream finally started becoming a reality in 2018. That year, the state legislature passed a bill that would fund a major renovation of Pillsbury Hall, since its interior was long overdue for an upgrade. The new design is catered to the English Department, and includes space for classrooms, offices, magazine production, and even a performance space in the attic. Acclaimed Minneapolis artist Seitu-Jones was recently selected to create a piece for the updated building, and construction is expected to be complete in the summer of 2021.
SOURCE- Gronseth, Adrian. "Pillsbury Hall." Clio: Your Guide to History. April 14, 2020. Accessed January 27, 2023. https://www.theclio.com/tour/1312/8
Sources
State Historic Preservation Office Staff. National Register of Historic Places Inventory -- Nomination Form, National Park Service. August 23rd 1984. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/33466d89-64c2-4ea4-9bd8-1b3f574c3c96.
Pillsbury Hall, University of Minnesota -- Earth & Environmental Sciences . Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.esci.umn.edu/facilities/pillsbury.
Pillsbury Hall Renovation, University of Minnesota -- College of Liberal Arts. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://cla.umn.edu/pillsbury-hall-renovation.
Bierschbach, Briana. Dayton Signs Minnesota Public Works Spending Bill Despite 'Concerns', MPR News. May 30th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.mprnews.org/story/2018/05/30/dayton-signs-minn-public-works-bill-despite-concerns.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 5th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-tuesdays-primary-als-ice-bucket-follow-reporter-panel/.
Almanac, TPT -- Twin Cities PBS. August 12th 2016. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://video.tpt.org/video/almanac-macys-future-pillsbury-hall-attic-presidential-politics/.
Pillsbury Hall -- University of Minnesota, Historic Twin Cities. October 29th 2018. Accessed April 13th 2020. http://www.historictwincities.com/2018/10/29/pillsbury-hall-university-of-minnesota/.
Nelson, Rick. Pillsbury Hall, U's Second-Oldest Building, in Line for $36 Million in TLC, Star Tribune. September 15th 2017. Accessed April 13th 2020. https://www.startribune.com/pillsbury-hall-u-s-second-oldest-building-in-line-for-36-million-in-tlc/444688963/.
Additional Information
The National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form for the Old Campus Historic District, which includes Pillsbury Hall
The University page with information and updates about the ongoing Pillsbury Hall renovation
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