The Outing Lodge ( Stillwater )

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Imagine a stately European country home of the 19th century, surrounded by lawns and gardens, 360 acres of wooded walking paths, and miles of rolling farm land ~ a place where people would go to get away. This is the ideal toward which the Outing Lodge at Pine Point is evolving. And what an evolution it has been.

Pine Point was originally founded in 1858 as Minnesota's second "poor farm," a home for the chronically indigent or people just temporarily down on their luck. Stillwater was a very wealthy community in 1850, the Territorial Capital. In this abundant atmosphere, a desire to help the less fortunate culminated in the construction of a Poor Farm in 1858. The prize winning dairy farm became both a home and a workplace to thousands over its 100 years of operation. When the Farm was discontinued in 1957, Pine trees were planted and it became Pine Point Park. The house went on as a Rest Home until 1977, when it was closed and left vacant. With the intention to save it from a proposed demolition, present owner Lee Gohlike began renovating the Georgian-style structure in the early 1980s. He gutted the interior of the Lodge with a reverence for its historic past; thus it retains a certain simplicity in the architecture of its interiors. In the common area, wide-planked wooden floors and paneling cut from 100-year-old pine and fir beams, proudly show all their cracks and imperfections, providing an enchanting backdrop for the elegant Early American and European Antique Furnishings. Numerous candelabra and seven massive fireplaces give it the feeling of a more Grand, bygone era.