2 weeks Ago By Rebecca Mitchell
ROCHESTER — A series of medical legacies carry on in a Pill Hill home. The home, across from the Mayo Foundation House, was built for Mayo Clinic’s youngest surgeon and his wife Jessie Sayre in 1914. The home’s second owners included the seventh general surgeon Dr.
James C. Masson and his wife Marion Knowles Masson. Those medical careers are honored with two Mayo buildings named after Ruth Charlton Mitchell Masson’s family, who was James’ second wife.
ADVERTISEMENT “I was eight years old in 1928 when the carillon bells at the top of the Mayo Clinic Building rang their melodies for the first time over the Zumbro River valley and that tall, stately building was dedicated to the ideals of the Mayo brothers,” daughter Helen Masson Copeland, who grew up in the Fourth Street Southwest home, wrote in her book, “Pill Hill: Growing Up with the Mayo Clinic.” She died in 2016. Pill Hill, known for historic homes with doctors’ connections to Mayo, stretches between Third Street and Ninth Street Southwest and Seventh and 10th Avenue Southwest.
Saint Marys Hospital physicians and employees kicked off the building between 1903 and 1911 with seven homes built, and Dr. William and Hattie Mayo moved into the Foundation House in 1916. The homes were not developed by Mayo or the city of Rochester.
The neighborhood has local and national historic district designations. Those early leaders in Rochester extend to the home’s architect Ellerbe & Associates and builders Garfield Schwartz & Company, who is known for building Mayowood and the Mayo Clinic buildings from 1914 to 1948. Historian Ken Allsen said in his book, “Old College Street,” that Ellerbe designed 33 Pill Hill homes and Schwartz built a “majority” of that neighborhood’s homes.
While sorting through a collection of “very cool” items from the Masson estate, John Kruesel said “I’m just glad I was involved, otherwise it would have been thrown away.” He saved the items as a local historian, auctioneer and antiques dealer. The collection includes a bison head from James Masson’s hunting excursions, snowshoes, hunting trip photographs and autographed photos of well-known people.
Kruesel described numerous elements in the seven-bedroom and seven-bathroom home as “thrilling.” Though, he said the kitchen might be the “most thrilling” with its cast-iron, wall-mounted sink and radiators with a warming oven. “When you took food out of a oven and you wanted to keep it (warm), let's say bread before it was served, you could put breads or hot dishes or other food inside of the radiator in a compartment that was made exactly for that,” Kruesel said of the home at 724 Fourth St.
SW. Realtor Nita Khosla said the “adorable” and “sweet” kitchen features are ones she would love in her own Pill Hill home. The Elizabethan Tudor Revival-style home is listed for $2.
3 million. ADVERTISEMENT “The double lot, it’s the lots (in Pill Hill) they’re not big at all. So that makes it really, really nice, I think,” Khosla said of the 0.
65-acre lot. As one of the first Ellerbe homes, as Khosla said, the property is part of Head and McMahon’s Addition owned by George Head, who is credited as one of the founders of Rochester. The street was West College Street then.
The doctors in the halls of Mayo Clinic were beginning their reputation as lifelong learners, including Beckman, who joined as a first assistant to Charlie Mayo and then neurosurgeon in 1907. Dr. William Worrall Mayo founded his medical practice in 1864 and they partnered with the Franciscen Sisters to open the first hospital in 1889.
“In 1907, Dr. Charles Mayo appointed Dr. Beckman to take care of neurosurgical cases as part of his practice, and by 1911, all neurosurgical cases were assigned to him,” wrote Neurosurgical Focus in August 2022.
“Dr. Beckman’s expertise in neurological procedures increased the number of patients who came to the Mayo Clinic for care.” Beckman was also one of the founders of the American College of Surgeons with William J.
Mayo, Charlie Mayo and Dr. Edward Starr Judd. Before Beckman’s death in 1916, Beckman and Masson worked together on surgeries.
Masson started his internship as first assistant to Judd at Saint Marys in 1912. In a book commissioned by Ruth Masson, Dr. Elizabeth Mussey wrote that James Masson’s operations totaled more than 40,000 from 1912 to 1946.
Mussey was Masson’s first assistant. He previously had a surgical practice in Dunnville, Ontario, Canada. He is also credited with two surgical instrument inventions as the self-retaining bladder retractor and Masson fascia (connective tissue) stripper.
ADVERTISEMENT “Although he wrote approximately 70 scientific reports, Dr. Masson is remembered primarily as a clinical surgeon,” wrote Clark W. Nelson in a Mayo Clinic Proceedings article in October 1991.
“His manner was modest and unassuming. During an operation, he was not known to raise his voice at assistants, and his unhurried style did not prevent him from completing procedures in a relatively short time.” From her family’s home across the street from the Foundation House, Copeland described Will and Hattie Mayo’s home as a “stately stone home topped by a tower for viewing the stars through a telescope.
” “In addition to a clothes chute to the basement laundry room, the house had other newfangled conveniences including a ‘whistle and talk’ pipeline,” Copeland wrote. “..
. The kitchen and bathrooms had separate faucets for drinking water straight from the water tower at Saint Mary’s Park.” Mussey said James enjoyed working on the plumbing and furnace in the home.
The 6,623-square-foot home welcomed guests with a porte-cochère, or covering, to easily drop people at the side door. There are two garage buildings. “I would just emphasize on all the beautiful floors and the woodwork and the crown moldings and doors, those are all original,” Khosla said.
The Massons had several animals, such as golden pheasants, goats, raccoons, squirrels and chickens. Copeland said they were affectionately known as the family with goats, Biff and Bang. “One of Dad’s favorite hunting dogs was named Trigger, a yellow Labrador retriever, a gift from a patient,” Copeland wrote.
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He became Dad’s faithful companion.” ADVERTISEMENT After fishing and hunting alongside fellow Mayo Clinic doctors, James Masson’s hunting trips decorated the home’s basement, such as deer and elk antlers, a brown bear rug and ringneck pheasant. He even escaped to the nature of what would become Apache Mall, where he hunted for prairie chickens, Mussey wrote.
There was a novelty to growing up with Mayo Clinic families from the 1920s to 1940s, as Copeland shared, such as knowing the scientific method and weekly movie nights at Rebecca Kendall and Dr. Edward C. Kendall’s home.
“We never knew the value of the people we took for granted,” Copeland wrote, such as Dr. Henry S. Plummer and Dr.
Fredrick A. Willius. With the new Mayo Clinic buildings, the neighborhood children explored them regularly as a fun activity, including the subway system.
She also participated in the parade welcoming President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Rochester and met Helen Keller when she was visiting for a checkup. “We children in the 1930’s felt at home in the Mayo Clinic’s beautiful skyscraper. We enjoyed looking at people from all over the world,” Copeland wrote.
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Plummer Hall seemed to me a more sacred place than the Congregational Church where I attended Sunday School. Graceful ghosts of profoundly moral men and women seemed present here.” Those years were not all idyllic, though, with a particular trauma in the death of a classmate and Victory Gardens carrying families after the war.
Although Ruth Charlton Mitchell Masson’s history with Mayo started with appointments in the 1920s, she added her legacy to the home and Rochester after marrying James Masson in 1965. She put in an elevator and air conditioning in the home. ADVERTISEMENT “(She) then thought to having some air conditioning put in the home because it had hot water cast iron radiators in the house, which are still in the home which from a historical standpoint very important,” Kruesel said.
While working with the Boston Trust Office, Graylen Becker and Kruesel of John Kruesel's General Merchandise in downtown Rochester said many of her items were not in the home. Her personal collection included stamps and a Tiffany lamp. When Khosla shopped at the Woolworth Company stores in England in the 1970-80s she couldn’t dream of the Rochester connection to come.
The stores, founded by Frank Winfield Woolworth in New York City, had 2,250 outlets in 1929, according to Britannica Money. Woolworth joined with several other retailers, including Ruth Masson’s father Earle Perry Charlton to grow the company. As a “Woolworth heiress,” as Becker described, she is credited as a longtime benefactor to Mayo.
She was the second largest donor to the Mayo Foundation in 1995, as the Post Bulletin reported. Some of her devotion in caring for the community included funding research on cancer and arthritis. “She had a passion for helping people less fortunate than herself and a fervent desire to care for the people she loved most,” Ruth’s nephew Earle Charlton shared with Inside Mayo Clinic in 2001.
Their Fourth Street home was also gifted to Mayo in a 1976 agreement. Beyond the walls of this Pill Hill home, the medical legacies live on throughout Rochester including the James C. Masson Professor of Surgery Research in the Mayo Foundation, the Charlton Building and the Ruth and Frederick M.
Mitchell Student Center of Mayo Medical School. ADVERTISEMENT “(Beckman) will ever remain in our memories as an ideal in every walk of life, be it as citizen, surgeon or friend, and we regard his loss as irreparable,” wrote a group of Beckman’s friends from Mayo and the Olmsted County Medical Society in 1916. “A brave man, honest and generous, with strong intellect and absolute devotion to principle, he always endeavored to elevate his profession, and constantly labored to advance its interests.
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