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Thompson Summer House

Houses completed in 1887Houses in Hennepin County, MinnesotaHouses on the National Register of Historic Places in MinnesotaNational Register of Historic Places in Hennepin County, Minnesota
Thompson Summer House
Thompson Summer House

The Thompson Summer House is a house in Minnetonka Beach, Minnesota, United States, listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It is located on Hennepin County Road 15, across from Lafayette Bay on Lake Minnetonka. The house was built in 1887 for Charles Telford Thompson, an attorney and civil leader, and his wife. It was listed on the National Register as a typical example of the types of Queen Anne summer homes that middle and upper-class Minneapolis residents owned on Lake Minnetonka during the end of the 19th century. An identical house owned by Samuel A. Harris, Charles Thompson's brother-in-law, once sat adjacent to the Thompson Summer House, but was demolished in 1968. In the 1990s, the house faced deterioration from erosion and rot. In an effort to stabilize the foundation and rebuild the wraparound porch while preserving the character of the house, the owners undertook a major restoration project. The project, conducted by Wes Foss, the husband of Thompson's great-great-granddaughter Debbie, was featured on a three-part episode of Hometime on PBS and won an award from the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota in 2005.The house is currently one of the oldest extant summer houses on Lake Minnetonka and is in excellent condition. It is still used strictly as a summer home (as it has always been) and frequently hosts family gatherings.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Thompson Summer House (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Thompson Summer House
Shoreline Drive,

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Latitude Longitude
N 44.938888888889 ° E -93.599722222222 °
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Shoreline Drive 3068
55391
Minnesota, United States
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Thompson Summer House
Thompson Summer House
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Peter Gideon Farmhouse
Peter Gideon Farmhouse

Peter Gideon (1820–1899) was a farmer near Excelsior, Minnesota, United States, who was responsible for breeding apples that could withstand Minnesota's climate. Gideon's farmhouse, now within the boundaries of Shorewood, Minnesota, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Gideon moved to Minnesota in 1853, near Lake Minnetonka, and experimented with planting pear, plum, cherry, peach, and apple seeds. After ten years of experimentation, the harsh Minnesota winters had killed off all of his trees except for one seedling crab apple tree. Seeking advice from a well-known expert in the field, he started corresponding with apple expert Francis Peabody Sharp in Woodstock, New Brunswick, Canada who had employed new, successful methods of hybridization starting back in 1844 (see more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Peabody_Sharp). Sharp instructed him on the proper methods for hybridizing apples and buying seeds for colder climates, specifically indicating Bangor, Maine as the place to buy the seeds (Bangor, ME is located directly over the border from Woodstock, Canada). Gideon never told anybody about corresponding with Sharp nor gave him any credit for his expert advice. Gideon, being a transcendentalist, just said "an invisible being" came to him in a dream and told him to get some Russian seeds from a company in Bangor, Maine. There is, however, written evidence of Sharp and Gideon corresponding about these matters. Therefore, thanks to the expert advice of Francis Peabody Sharp, he sent back to Bangor, Maine for seeds and scions, and continued his experiments by grafting a scion onto the crab apple tree. From this experiment, in 1868 he successfully selected a variety of apple that he named the "Wealthy", in honor of his wife. In March 1878, Minnesota established a State Experimental Fruit Farm by act of the Legislature which Gideon ran for eleven years, planting many thousands of apple trees and distributing his best seeds across the state. He had been experimenting unsuccessfully with breeding apples for the colder Minnesota climate. This is what led him to seek out the expertise and advice of Francis Peabody Sharp's on how to grow his fruits in Minnesota, using Russian seeds and using new Sharp's new techniques of hybridization. [1] The state farm was located near Gideon's land on Lake Minnetonka, under the jurisdiction of the University of Minnesota. When the farm closed in February 1889 due to conflicts with the University, Gideon lost his job. Gideon later became the first superintendent of a University of Minnesota agricultural experiment station established in 1878. The station was abandoned in 1889, when he retired, but in 1907 the Minnesota Legislature established a fruit breeding farm between Excelsior and Chaska. The fruit breeding farm later became the Horticultural Research Center, which is now part of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. The center later developed the Haralson apple, introduced in 1922. The Wealthy apple is genetically related to the Haralson, though it took DNA testing to rediscover this fact after extensive hybridization.