Charles A. Lindbergh State Park - History

History

Charles August Lindbergh, known as C.A., was a prominent lawyer and real estate trader in Little Falls. In March 1901 he married Evangeline Lodge Land, the college-educated descendent of two notable Detroit medical families, who had come to Little Falls the previous autumn as a teacher. She, C.A., and his two daughters from a previous marriage moved to a property which C.A. had purchased for a dairy farm three years earlier. They had a three-story house built on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. A tenant's house was built across the road for the farm workers. Charles Augustus Lindbergh was born in 1902, and would be the couple's only child. A barn was built later that year, and the farm was populated with cattle, goats, hogs, sheep, chickens, and pigeons as well as cats and dogs.

On August 5, 1905 a fire started for unknown reasons on the third floor. The house burned down to its stone foundation, but the Lindberghs and their servants escaped injury and managed to save many of the household items. The Lindberghs had a new house built on the foundation of the first. However it was much smaller, due to C.A.'s overextended finances and a growing strain in the marriage. The new house fit awkwardly onto the footprint of the old, necessitating a short hallway with seven doors leading off. The basement, intended as a library for C.A., and the upper floor was never finished. Instead C.A. entered politics and in 1907 began serving the first of five consecutive terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. For the next decade the younger Charles spent much of each year in Detroit and Washington, D.C., leaving only two or three months at the house in Little Falls. However Charles would credit his time spent on the farm and playing along the Mississippi for his strength and self-reliance. The unfinished upper floor became Charles' exclusive play area, and upon hearing an unusually loud engine one day in 1911 he climbed out onto the roof and saw his first airplane.

Evangeline's relationship with C.A. and his daughters worsened, and in 1917 she and Charles moved back into the house year-round. Charles continued sleeping in his bedroom, which was really a screened-in porch, on all but the very coldest winter nights. He began overseeing the farm and was an early adopter of mechanization technology. Charles left in 1920 to attend college and returned only once, in 1923, arriving in his Curtiss JN-4 plane and landing in a field on the west side of the property. In the next two years the barn burned down and C.A. died, and the farm was largely neglected. After Charles Lindbergh became famous in 1927, souvenir seekers frequently broke into the empty house and caused extensive damage.

Encouraged by locals hoping to see the house protected, the Lindbergh family donated the 110-acre (0.45 km2) farm to the state of Minnesota in 1931 as a park in memory of C.A. The family worked with the Minnesota Historical Society to restore the home, and donated many original furnishings. The Works Progress Administration developed the park for recreation. In 1969 the house and its grounds were transferred to the Minnesota Historical Society. In what was to be his final public address, Charles spoke from the porch of his boyhood home at the 1973 grand opening of an adjacent interpretive center. He died the following year. The Lindbergh Visitor Center initially focused on the three generations of Lindberghs in America, at the request of the spotlight-leery Charles. However a 2002 remodeling doubled the exhibit space and added more about the aviator himself.