The Gilded Age Mansion Built on Blood: The Glensheen

The $31 million Glensheen Mansion in Duluth, Minnesota hides two dark secrets: the Iron Range mining exploitation that funded its construction, and one of Minnesota's most notorious murders. In 1905, lawyer Chester Congdon built this 39-room Jacobean Revival palace with wealth extracted from 16,000 striking miners earning $2 per day while he made $100,000 annually. Immigrant workers who couldn't speak English were blacklisted when they demanded fair treatment. One striker was shot dead by company guards.
Seventy years later, on June 27, 1977, the mansion became a crime scene. 83-year-old heiress Elisabeth Congdon was smothered with a satin pillow in her bed. Her nurse Velma Pietila was beaten to death with a brass candlestick on the grand staircase. The killer came for $8 million in inheritance. The investigation, trials, and shocking acquittal became Minnesota's trial of the century.
This documentary exposes how iron ore built beauty through labor exploitation, how servants worked 15-hour days maintaining elegance, and how greed transformed Minnesota's premier historic mansion into a murder scene. Subscribe for more untold stories behind America's grand estates—the financial crises, worker exploitation, and brutal violence that determined whether beauty endured or crumbled.

DISCLAIMER
Content Warning: This episode contains detailed discussions of labor exploitation, workplace violence including the shooting death of a striker, and graphic descriptions of a double murder including the beating death of a nurse and suffocation of an elderly woman. This documentary is researched from historical records, court documents, news archives, university collections, and published sources including trial transcripts and investigative reports. Presented for educational and historical purposes.