Although the “Cobb House” is a block off Lake Avenue, this blog/book would not be complete without a chapter on it. It is the only solid brick Queen Anne style home in the city and the only White Bear Lake residence to be listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.
It also was one of the first year-round homes, built in a community of “summer cottages”. Walkers can see it in all its orange glory if they look north as they cross Banning Avenue. The house is on the northwest corner of First St. and Banning Ave.
Kelly and Bob Whalen in their Queen Anne living room. photo by Mary Lukas Pierce
On March 16, 2024, Kelly and Bob Whalen welcomed me into their historic home to talk about the house and their passion for preserving old-fashioned charm. Since purchasing the home in 2020, they’ve put a lot of energy into making the home their own, building a timeline for the history of the house, and collecting East Lake furniture to match the period in which the 1885 home was built. Please see the timeline Kelly compiled at the end of this chapter.
Who was the Cobb family?
According to Looking Back at White Bear Lake, Cyrus B. Cobb was an agent for the St. Paul and Duluth Railroad for seven years after coming to White Bear Lake in 1879. He was also in the lumber and building materials business. A block in downtown White Bear Lake was named for him a couple years after his death in 1888. Located north of Fourth Street and Railroad Avenue, the Cobb Block burned down on July 11, 1894.
The religious Cyrus Cobb was active in St. John in the Wilderness Church at Clark Avenue and First St. He was superintendent of its Sabbath School. And he also was appointed to the first library board of directors. His home served as the first rectory for St. John’s in the early 1900s.
In 1912, the house was bought by the Claude C. Curry family, who operated White Bear Tavern, which was known for its $1 chicken dinners. They owned it for more than 10 years. It’s unclear who owned the house from the early 1920s-1954, although Kelly Whalen says descendants of a family who ran a rooming house during this period stop by from time to time.
On Sept. 4, 1941, the biggest cyclone/tornado ever to hit White Bear blew the second-story porch off the home. It had been located on the upper right side of the building as shown in the photo below.
This 2000 photo is from the book Looking Back at White Bear Lake by Cynthia Vadnais.
Holtz family starts home’s revival period
The Edward Holtz family bought the home in 1954. During an interview with Edward Holtz’s daughter Jan Holtz-Kraemer, she pointed out the irony of a lumber baron building a brick home. She mentioned that he also built the house next store on First Street for his daughter Harriet.
“My dad (an industrial arts instructor at White Bear High School) purchased the house for $9,500 in 1954,” said Holtz-Kraemer. “It had been a rooming house and was in pretty bad shape. We couldn’t live in it right away, so we lived in a rental on Shady Lane.
“My Dad and his father Erick Holtz renovated the house. It was a great place to grow up.” She mentioned that the lot across from their house toward the lake was empty, so they and their neighbors who owned it had picnics there frequently, Ed Holtz died at age 85 in 2006, and the family sold their homestead to the Kraii family.
Left: My Mom Barb Chapman Nelson with Jan Holtz-Kraemer at a St. John’s of the Wilderness Church open house, which was featured during the 2019 White Bear Lake Area Historical Society Home Tour fundraiser.
Major remodeling
When the Holtz home was purchased in 2007, Dave Kraai and his family undertook extensive remodeling. According to the Whalens, this included changing the layout of the home, modernizing the electrical work, raising the roof to add a third-story space and adding an attached garage with a space above it used for a home business.
During this remodel, the home was turned into a single-family home with spaces for two home businesses. Dave Kraai chronicled the extensive remodel in a blog:
Architecture
Although this book/blog, features a chapter on Lake Avenue architecture, since there currently are no Queen Annes directly on Lake Avenue, the Queen Anne style is not discussed in that chapter. A subset of the Victorian style, which is popular throughout White Bear Lake, the Queen Anne style was at its peak in the United States in the1880-90s and became popular in Ramsey County at the turn of the Century, according to the Historic Sites Survey of St. Paul and Ramsey County.
Left: Entryway at the Cobb House today. Left Below: Living room at the Whalen home.
Queen Anne style
The Queen Anne style was used in all sizes of houses, from cottages to mansions. And it features a lot of ornamentation, including towers, turrets, porches and balconies, projecting pavilions and bay windows, classically inspired scrollwork, spindly porch columns, and windows in all sizes and shapes, often with colored panes, stained glass, or etched glass, according to the above study. Home design website Hunker says “Queen Anne homes have a storybook quality to them”.
Fortunately for the Whalens, they have a stained-glass artist in residence. Kelly’s father Lee Gehrmann and his wife Frieda live with them at the Cobb complex, and her father has reconnected with an old hobby. He’s made a stained-glass batman logo for Bob’s office and a whale for the Whalens, who are lovers of the ocean and sea creatures.
Stained glass whale by Lee Gehrmann. photo by Mary Lukas Pierce.
Left A picture taken of 4631 Lake Ave in circa 2015 shows both its Queen Anne and Victorian bones. The 1889 house was most recently purchased in 2017 and has undergone significant renovation since then. See below.
New traditions
“Our intention for the Cobb house is to do as much actual restoration to the home as possible,” the Whalens said. “Instead of remodeling, we want to bring back some of the original details of the home, such as the open-air front porch and the original unpainted woodwork. However, we do enjoy indoor bathrooms, so we won’t change that,” they laughed.
Left: A fun new Whalen tradition is to place Christmas trees in graduated sizes in their home’s southeast windows, creating the effect of one very tall three-story Christmas tree.
Cobb House Timeline
Compiled by Kelly Whalen
1885: home is completed.
1888: Cyrus B. Cobb passes away in July.
Circa 1888-1905: It was donated to St. John's in the Wilderness Church when he died. His family may have continued to live in the home for some years. (Cobb's wife Ella Jane Cobb appears in the 1885 local census, but doesn’t appear in the 1910 census.
Circa 1910: The church owns the home and uses it as a rectory. (Notes from the church's history mention it being sold in 1910.)
1912-23: It was purchased by the Curry family and operated as a tavern/restaurant called Curry's Tavern; chicken dinners were sold for $1.
Pre-1954: Sometime in this period, the home was turned into a rooming house and the former owners have grandchildren who still stop in. Kelly Whalen said “one stopped by to talk to me about their experience growing up in the house.” She is trying to track down the name of this family.
1954 - 2007: The Holtz family owns the home. Ed Holtz and his father Erick did an initial remodel of the home in 1954, and they operated the home as a duplex.
2007 - 2016: the Dave Kraai family purchased the home and did significant remodeling discussed in the article above.
2016 - 2020: The Nelson family purchased the home. They owned several homes and decided to sell this one. During Covid, the house was for sale from January 2019 to December 2020.
2020 - current: The Whalen family purchased the home.
Sources
Looking Back at White Bear Lake by Cynthia Vadnais
Interviews with Kelly and Robert Whalen March 2024
Interviews with Jan Holtz-Kraemer 2023-2024
Historic Sites Survey of St. Paul and Ramsey County
By St. Paul Heritage Preservation Commission and Ramsey County Historical Society, published in 1981.
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