If you haven’t been to Mineral Point, a small town in southwest Wisconsin, you might not know about its many historic buildings. In the 1800s, Cornish immigrants gravitated there when lead mining was booming.
Nearly a century later, two men – both life and business partners – saved a cluster of stone cottages that would become a state historic site called Pendarvis, the name of an estate in Cornwall. Their names are Bob Neal and Edgar Hellum. Both were born in 1906—Bob in Mineral Point and Edgar in Stoughton, Wisconsin.
Before passing away, late in his life, Edgar recalled the crumbling cottage Bob showed him in what had been the heart of Mineral Point’s mining community. The year was 1934.
“Bob said 'what do you think of it' and I said ‘we’ll just have to probably take the inside of the house out,” says Edgar.
That’s pretty much what happened.
Edgar recalled a bit of the worked involved in pulling off their first project: “We took up the floors and what not firs, and then began to figure out what we had to replace in the way of floor joists. And then we got two kids to go up in the attic and knock all the plaster down – oh the dirt and the soot! [We] put it in a wheelbarrow – we had a plank from the house out to the truck,” he explained.
Then Edgar and Bob did some homework.
“I didn’t know anything about the old houses. We went around and looked at all the old houses. Looked at the windows and chimneys and doors and things like that. We really made a serious study, I more so, because I was going to do the building—Bob wasn’t a carpenter at all,” Edgar said with a laugh. “I wasn’t a carpenter either, but at least I played carpentry.”
They not only lacked previous restoration experience, Bob and Edgar didn’t have much money.
To bring some in, they started serving tea and saffron cake in the cottage they dubbed Pendarvis House in honor of its Cornish roots. The tearoom soon morphed into a restaurant where Bob and Edgar served classic Cornish fare with panache.
The business took off and the Pendarvis House quickly became a nationally recognized restaurant appearing in publications such as National Geographic and Life magazines.
“Mostly it’s the people, not just famous people; we had marvelous interesting people that came because they heard about it and when they were there, they thoroughly enjoyed themselves and that was a satisfaction. That people who knew how to eat out came and enjoyed our simple farm fare, but we did it with a touch of class. It was tops,” Edgar boosted. “We made the best pasties that anybody made in Mineral Point.”
Edgar and Bob not only resurrected the stone cottage, they turned it into the home of a nationally-recognized restaurant where they served classic Cornish fare with panache.
“Bob knew how to set a table perfectly and arrange flowers. Do things with what I called ‘a touch of class.’ He would say 'I made dinner especially for you or 'We made the best pasties in Mineral Point,'” said Edgar.
Edgar leaned into building and gardening and then more “from the bottom up“ restoration projects followed.
"We were two entirely different individuals, and we had a very definite agreement. If we had any differences, we sat right down and talked it over and invariably we came with a better solution than either one of us could have had to start. That’s the only reason that we got along. Well, we lived together for 45 years," said Edgar.
As Pendarvis House hummed along, they bought more miners’ homes. Over the years, Edgar kept rehabbing, adding gardens, stone walls, and terraces.
Edgar didn’t work alone. In the late 1950s, Edgar hired Richard Reger and his brothers.
“We used to go swimming all the time and we’d cut through Pendarvis up over the hill on our way home just about every night. And then eventually Edgar asked ‘do you guys need a job?” Richard says.
Richard was 14-years-old at the time. He worked with Bob and Edgar until he was drafted just before he turned 21.
He describes their work "a little of everything.”
Our conversation with Richard took place in a rowhouse–sort of three houses smashed together–that they breathed life back into.
“Toward the end in the 60s we started on this project here—tearing the exterior off to expose the logs and everything. Hauling rock in for the rock walls and we just worked for, I think it was, three years. Edgar my brother and I,” Richard says.
Richard felt close to both Bob and Edgar.
“They were like my dads I guess you could put it that way because we did all kinds of things. Bob had a piggy bank on his dresser upstairs and it would hold $40 worth of dimes,” Richard says. “As soon as he had it filled up with dimes, Victor, Edgar, Bob and I would go have a steak dinner.”
Fellow Mineral Point native Karen Fischer, who worked at the Pendarvis House restaurant, doesn’t share Richard’s warm fuzzy memories.
“I needed a job because I was going to be going to college. I started between my junior and senior year in high school. I just called, he had me come out and he said ‘I think I know your mom’ I said okay, I hope that’s good and I got the job,” Karen says.
She was hired to be a server. “Well, a little bit of everything actually. We helped put the pastries together, we cleaned watercress, we kept the kitchen at Pendarvis running. Some days we were out between the stones pulling weeds,” Karen says. “Whatever needed doing, we did.”
The restaurant was Bob’s domain.
“He was very firm, very strict, we had to do things only one way, his way. We always called him Mr. Neal and we’d call Edgar ‘Edgar,'” Karen says.
In 1971 Bob and Edgar sold Pendarvis House, and the other buildings they restored within the 4 ½ acre parcel—cumulatively all known as Pendarvis Historic Site.
On a recent tour, guide Judy Devidio led the way through the cottages, including the one that Bob and Edgar shared.
“This is the living room. It’s much like Bob had it, and there are many items that Bob placed here,” Judy says.
Judy talked about their relationship.
“Very few people who were opposites seem to meld together and stay together that long. They do love each other too,” Judy says.
Up until recently, visitors would have heard a lot of about Mineral Point’s mining history on this tour, and very little of Bob and Edgar’s creative accomplishment and not a whisper of their personal story.
In fact, the Pendarvis House restaurant’s once famous dining room décor was transformed into a miner’s cottage.
A slow shift began with the arrival of Kori Oberle in 1987 as Pendarvis’ new curator.
“I was curious about the Pendarvis House restaurant days from 1935 to 1970. And then all of a sudden in walks Edgar with his walking stick and his dog Tipper," Kori recalls.
Kori says she came to learn Bob and Edgar’s Pendarvis was an artistic, theatrical creation.
Kori and Edgar remained close friends the remaining 13 years of Edgar's life.
“I had the opportunity to really see most of the 20th century through Edgar’s eyes. He was born in 1906 and lived until 2000. I learned about the context of his creation, his co-creation of Pendarvis within his lifespan but also within that almost all of the 20th century. I was able to nestle that within Wisconsin history,” Kori says. “And to some extent the slow food movement, which they didn’t know they were part of before it was cool, before Alice Waters was around.”
Beyond their historical importance, she says Edgar Hellum forever changed her life.
“He’s part of my world view, he was so much more than a mentor. I mean it’s a pretty strange relationship. He was 50 years my senior and gay and I’m not gay, but we found common ground,” Kori says.
She wanted to paint a fuller picture of Bob and Edgar. The result was a book filled with photos of their lives’ work published by the Wisconsin Historical Society in 1990.
It’s a testament to Edgar’s enduring charm that his reminiscences, you heard a snippet of earlier in the story, came to be preserved by a fellow named Jim Stroschein.
Jim’s connection to Edgar is pure serendipity. Jim knew nothing about Mineral Point, but learned about its history during his college days at UW-Eau Claire.
“I had a two-credit Wisconsin history class and it was taught by the retired chancellor. He said if you really want to see about territorial Wisconsin, you need to go to Mineral Point and he described coming to Pendarvis House restaurant with his wife back in the ‘60s, so he really lit the spark in me about Mineral Point.,” Jim says. “In 1996, my wife and I moved here.”
Then when Jim learned Edgar Hellum was still alive and living in Mineral Point, “That moment for me was like reading about Lewis and Clark and then having someone tell you ‘oh by the way, Clark is still alive and he lives across town,” Jim says.
The two became fast friends.
"He could tell you the price of flour in 1933 and flowers and trees and just a tremendous scope of life and I think somehow all of that somehow came through his art and in his craftsmanship. And I see it everywhere when I walk through Pendarvis,” Jim says.
Jim says Edgar and Bob’s place in historic preservation cannot be underestimated.
“When Bob and Edgar saved Pendarvis and people saw the end result, those little stone cottages went from people being indifferent to them to... went from indifference to emulation. Everybody wanted a little stone cottage and that spread. People came to celebrate the architecture of Mineral Point. It established Mineral Point’s identity as a place for historic preservation, as a home for artists, a welcoming community,” Jim says. “And that’s still true today”.
The Wisconsin Historical Society has launched a multi-year, multi-million dollar project to infuse more of Bob and Edgar’s lives into Pendarvis including their private library that brimmed over with books and music.
People who knew him, think Edgar Hellum would be pleased. Here’s what he told Jim Stroschein in one of their conversations.
“When we sit here and reminisce like this, all these things come up. It begins to make my card catalog start to ruffle too because a lot of the things I had kind of forgotten about. The things that we did and were smart enough to do,” Edgar said. “I have to give ourselves credit now because we just did them, you see. We did a pretty fair job.”
