June 3 in the City Hall Training Room from 4:30 p.m. until 6 at night, 28 people showed up to see what Three Sixty of La Crosse and ISG as the architectural partner had on offer. One would be remiss, however, not to mention as well the 120 or so residents who indicated at some point prior to the Thursday meeting that they wanted to be kept in touch as to the future of the Greek Revival-style mansion. So what’s the plan, exactly?

“It depends on what the people want,” Jeremy Novak said of City residents and prospective apartments at Cedarhurst along with shops to surround the mansion as anchor property. “Do they want the mansion preserved or not?” he asked. Without a model to make the property economically viable long-term, the chances of the Mansion surviving for several more decades were slim at best. Although a tentative name for the development could be ‘The Square at Cedarhurst,’ this wasn’t set in stone, Novak made known. Surrounded on multiple sides by either present or future development and with a corn field across the road slated for commercial in the future, the question of how to preserve the property was in due earnest. So what was, or is, the Cedarhurst mansion? Several giant notepads along with posters at the June 3 meeting were meant to stimulate discussion.

“As a team, our focus to create a sense of ‘place,’” the first notepad said. “What does this phrase mean to you?”

“Green space,” one resident wrote. “Trees are very important. Especially bordering properties.”

“Cottage Grove needs a gathering place,” wrote another. “A place to go for dining and recreation…that welcomes you to enjoy the Mansion.”

A third resident, meanwhile, wrote of the need for a “Sense of Community,” with food, shops, and a community center “like Irvin Park in St. Paul. That led into the next question.

“What type of ‘Community-centered’ features does this development need?” the next giant notepad asked, to which one resident replied that they, “would love to see the farm buildings saved,” with a ? by the word ‘rural’— all of which leads into the fourth question posed on the giant notepads.

“What does historic preservation mean to you?” To answer that question, it might help to know a little about Cedarhurst’s founders, Cordenio and Mary Severance, buried just down the road at Cottage Grove Cemetery. What was it like in their time?

“It was a working farm,” said Jeremy Novak of Three Sixty on how Cedarhurst began, also hosting Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, William Taft, Warren Harding, and Calvin Coolidge. As to the illustrious visitor list, add Frank Kellog, who it is thought penned the famous Kellog-Briand Pact in Cedarhurst’s rural and quiet atmosphere prior to suburbanization around the mid-1960s. Suburbanization, meanwhile, put together the railroad village of Langdon, farm village of Old Cottage Grove, and Thompson Grove, a set of residential homes that formed the nucleus of what today is modern Cottage Grove. If you’ve been reading the Look Backs from the latter 20th century you know about it. As to the present, the Cedarhurst Mansion remains, but whether it will in the future, is up to people like me and you.

But as those who know the history of the anti-war Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928 drafted at Cedarhurst are aware, it will take more than good intentions to keep Cedarhurst around, well into the future. In the meantime, let the rain fall!

Survey Says. Photo by Joseph Back