The Jonathan Taylor Grimes House is one of the oldest standing houses in

Edina, Minnesota Edina ( ) is a city in Hennepin County, Minnesota, United States and a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis. The population was 53,494 at the 2020 census, making it the 18th most populous city in Minnesota. Edina began as a small farming and mil ...

, United States.

Description and history

It was built in 1869, and appears to have been influenced by Andrew Jackson Downing's book ''The Architecture of Country Houses''. The house is a 1½ story frame cottage with intersecting gable roofs, dormers, a bay window, and a shallow front porch.

Gothic Revival Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic, neo-Gothic, or Gothick) is an architectural movement that began in the late 1740s in England. The movement gained momentum and expanded in the first half of the 19th century, as increasingly ...

details are found in the second-story windows, the steeply pitched roof lines, and the gabled wall dormers. Some Italianate influences are also present in the shallow

portico A portico is a porch leading to the entrance of a building, or extended as a colonnade, with a roof structure over a walkway, supported by columns or enclosed by walls. This idea was widely used in ancient Greece and has influenced many cult ...

and the wide eaves with scroll-cut brackets. The house was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1976. The owner of the house, Jonathan Taylor Grimes, was an early settler in the Edina area and a pioneer

horticulturist Horticulture is the branch of agriculture that deals with the art, science, technology, and business of plant cultivation. It includes the cultivation of fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, herbs, sprouts, mushrooms, algae, flowers, seaweeds and no ...

. Grimes was born in Leesburg, Virginia in 1818 and moved to

Terre Haute, Indiana Terre Haute ( ) is a city in and the county seat of Vigo County, Indiana, United States, about 5 miles east of the state's western border with Illinois. As of the 2010 census, the city had a population of 60,785 and its metropolitan area had a ...

in 1840. He married Eliza Angeline Gordon in 1843. Eliza and Jonathan, along with three small children, moved to Saint Anthony in 1854. In 1859, Grimes and a partner, William Rheem, purchased in the southwest corner of what was then Richfield Township. This land included the Waterville Mill on Minnehaha Creek. The mill was later known as the Buckwater Mill, then the Browndale Mill, and finally the Edina Mill. Grimes later obtained a quit claim deed to north and east of the mill, where he built the house in 1869. In 1867, Grimes and Rheem sold the mill, and Grimes went on to become the first president of the Minnesota Horticultural Society. He conducted a variety of agricultural experiments, and he was responsible for introducing ginkgo and

catalpa ''Catalpa'', commonly called catalpa or catawba, is a genus of flowering plants in the family Bignoniaceae, native to warm temperate and subtropical regions of North America, the Caribbean, and East Asia. Description Most ''Catalpa'' are decidu ...

trees to Minnesota. Eliza Grimes died in 1902, and her husband died in 1903. After his death, the farmstead was subdivided. It became the Morningside area, a

streetcar suburb A streetcar suburb is a residential community whose growth and development was strongly shaped by the use of streetcar lines as a primary means of transportation. Such suburbs developed in the United States in the years before the automobile, when ...

. Morningside seceded from Edina in 1920, then rejoined Edina in 1966. Grimes Avenue in Edina is named for him, and Alden Drive is named for his son.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Grimes, Jonathan Taylor, House Buildings and structures in Edina, Minnesota Carpenter Gothic architecture in Minnesota Houses completed in 1869 Houses in Hennepin County, Minnesota Houses on the National Register of Historic Places in Minnesota 1869 establishments in Minnesota National Register of Historic Places in Hennepin County, Minnesota