Tom Wallin’s first memory of the family house on Park Point that he now calls home is the tall grass. It felt like an African jungle when his grandfather lived at the last home at the end of the point. He also recalls playing like pirates on a beached sailboat.
And he remembers the cold.
That shivering recollection wasn’t difficult to muster up when he and his wife Jane took over the home in 2013. No one had spent a winter in the “summer house” since 1967. They were about to endure the “polar vortex” winter there.
Jane’s first visit to the house was in 1980, right after they married. She still shakes her shoulders at the warning about bats upstairs in the sleeping quarters.
Wallin’s mother had been using the place during summers. The couple had been living in Indiana, where they were raising six children. The last of their kids moved out, and Wallin’s mother died.
They decided to make the move to Duluth.
The thought of taking over what had been the family home since the 1930s had crossed Wallin’s mind. But you always think “mom’s going to live forever,” he said. “For her, this place was as close as you get to heaven.”
Wallin wanted to keep the home in the family. And the couple took the dive in.
“The idea was to make the place livable,” Wallin said.
They’ve improved the winter situation with new windows, insulation, a heat pump and auxilary heat upstairs. The open hearth fireplace remains. A new roof was put on, a new dormer floods light into revamped rooms once damaged by leaking water.
The couple was recently honored for their work by the Duluth Preservation Alliance. It comes not so much for Herculean efforts to totally remodel the home built in 1908. One step into the great room, and you step back in time. It’s what remains from the day it went up that impresses.
Wallin lived in the home as a boy, but the family moved away in the late 1960s. Then it became a summer place again for the family, just like during its earliest days, when the Anneke family lived there. Percy Anneke was a mining magnate and partner with August Fitger in the brewing business.
Wallin’s grandfather was Wally Hankins, a World War I aviation veteran with a colorful life in Duluth. He was a bookstore owner, former newspaperman and radio personality known as “The Sage of Park Point.” Grape vines he planted remain outside the home.
Back then, there was no road to the end of Park Point. Even the Wallin family had to catch the bus at today’s current turnaround a few blocks away.
“It was all woods,” Wallin said. “They built the house by using a barge” to bring in the materials.
“The location is the major feature,” Wallin said.
He said the couple had to strike a “good balance” when it came to plans for restoration. He was a minimalist, Jane was adamant on more extensive fixes, especially after that cold winter.