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Shelden Mansion
196 Fort Street West, Detroit, Michigan
Built
1875, for Allan Shelden (1832-1905) and his wife, Katharine Butler
Dusenbury (1829-1916). This was among the grandest of the great mansions
that once lined Detroit's Fort Street West. Designed by Gordon Lloyd,
it is thought to have been an early influence on the central block of
the Traverse City State Hospital (built 1885). The Shelden mansion was
demolished circa 1920.
Allan Shelden Residence, Detroit
https://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A149307
Allan
Shelden ran a wholesale dry goods firm with his business partner,
Senator Zachariah Chandler (1813-1879), which became known as Allan
Shelden & Co. when the latter died in 1879. His selection to the
board of the Detroit National Bank cemented his position among the
city's business elite. His wife (whose name is also spelt Catharine or
Catherine) was the eldest daughter of Henry Richard Dusenbury
(1801-1860), a wealthy lumber merchant of Portville, New York.
They
commissioned Detroit's most celebrated architect of the time, Gordon W.
Lloyd (1832-1905), to build them a sumptuous new family home on the
site of - or very near to - the recently demolished farmhouse that had
belonged to Senator Lewis Cass (1782–1866), Governor of Michigan. Lloyd
blended brick with a cut stone finishing to produce a predominantly
Elizabethan design, though the central tower with it's mansard roof was
typical of Second Empire architecture.
A contemporary account in the Detroit Free Press
described the mansion as containing, "countless rooms, each of which is
fitted in superb style": These included the butternut hallway
interspersed with ornamental panels, a music room, billiards room and a
library of cherry-wood. The drawing-room, filled with treasures of art
and sculpture, was decorated in the "American renaissance," with walls
lined in delicate oriental silk under an "unusually rich frieze and
decorated ceiling".
Even before the Civil War, Mrs
Shelden had gained a reputation as one of fashionable Detroit's most
popular hostesses. Her portrait that hung in the music room on Fort
Street was donated to the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1985 by the widow
of her great-grandson, Allan Shelden III (1916-1976). It was only
shortly before her death that she left her home of forty years for Deeplands.
Shelden
had died at the mansion in 1905, when it was left to their only child,
Henry Dusenbury Shelden (1862-1941). Harry, as he was known, lived there
with his society wife, Caroline Annette Alger (1865-1935), children,
and widowed mother. But, having relinquished his role in dry goods back
in 1890, it was now only his less time-consuming executive positions
that tied him to city-life.
From 1911, the Sheldens (including his widowed mother) made their permanent home at Deeplands,
Harry's recently completed country estate on Lake St. Clair in Grosse
Pointe. The history surrounding the final chapter of their city mansion
is as yet unclear, but it was not before long that it suffered the same
fate as many like it and was demolished to make way for progress.
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Contributed by Mark Meredith on 26/09/2018 and last updated on 20/01/2019. Show references
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