Obituary: For innkeeper Art Palmer Jr., the Lowell Inn was a ‘labor of love’

For Art Palmer Jr., the longtime owner of the Lowell Inn in downtown Stillwater, innkeeping was “a business of a thousand little details.”

No one will notice them all, Palmer Jr. told the New York Times in 1985, but everyone will notice something.

“I started bringing in blended coffee roasted in a small town in Switzerland and people raved about our coffee,” Palmer said in the article headlined “A Minnesota Inn from a Gentler Era.” “Some like the lettuce cup, or the dishes, the silverware or the down pillows. A guy came to me one time and said he didn’t like down pillows, but he sure liked the coffee.”

Palmer Jr., whose family owned and operated the inn for nearly 70 years, died Saturday of natural causes at an assisted-living facility in Ellijay, Ga. He was 94.

‘A labor of love’

“The inn was a labor of love,” said Bill Palmer, the eldest of his nine children. “He thought of himself as an ‘innkeeper,’ which is more of a foreign view of it. He wanted to create something special to entertain people. (My parents) weren’t into music or entertainment, but they knew food, and they knew how to create a special room experience.”

Palmer, the only child of Arthur Palmer Sr. and Nelle Palmer, grew up inside the Lowell Inn. He and his parents lived in a small apartment on the second floor that was later converted to Room 21.

His parents quit vaudeville careers when he was 2 and moved to Stillwater in 1930 to become the hotel’s on-site managers. In 1935, they leased the Inn for their own. Ten years later, they purchased it.

To attract guests from the Twin Cities, the Palmers painted all the telephone poles between Minneapolis and Stillwater blue-and-white and then told customers in newspaper advertisements to follow the colorful guideposts to the inn, said Brent Peterson, executive director of the Washington County Historical Society. The telephone company took a dim view of the stunt, and Palmer ended up repainting its poles, “but they got what they wanted, which was a lot of attention and more people finding their way to Stillwater,” he said.

Art Palmer Jr. graduated from St. Thomas Military Academy in 1946 and received a bachelor’s degree in business administration at Cornell University in 1950.

In December 1949, he married Maureen O’Brien, his childhood sweetheart, at St. Michael’s Church in Stillwater. The reception was held at the Lowell Inn.

In 1950, he was commissioned into the Army. When Art Palmer Sr. died the following year, he was called back to help his mother run the inn, Bill Palmer said.

Matterhorn room

According to the article in the New York Times, it was a ski trip to the Swiss Alps in the mid-1950s that prompted Palmer to come up with what he considered his greatest achievement. Palmer and the other guests were stranded overnight at an inn below the Matterhorn when an unexpected blizzard hit.

“The drifts were 20 feet high,” he told the newspaper. ”It was one of the most dramatic experiences of my life.”

A caretaker suggested that they gather up all the food that was around and make fondue. They got out the pots and ate fondue and drank wine “until a rescue party found them the next day,” the article states. That was the genesis for the Lowell Inn’s Matterhorn Room, which opened in 1960.

The wood-carved room features a white mahogany landscape of the Matterhorn and the village of Zermatt that was hand carved on site by Swiss wood carver Edward “Eddie” Blatter, Bill Palmer said. “He came and lived at the Inn for three years while he was making it,” he said. “I mean, who would do that in the 1960s? Bring a Swiss wood carver over to live and carve out the room that you’re creating? It was groundbreaking – a big business move, a big investment. He was a visionary.”

Art and Maureen Palmer also upgraded the food and service and redid all the rooms, Bill Palmer said.

“That attention to detail and service is really what he was all about,” he said. “When they did the rooms, the rooms weren’t the same. They added little details to them all – the way they built them out and the trim. They totally gutted everything, expanded the sizes, and when you walked into a room, you would go, ‘Wow, this is something really unique.’”

The Inn was known for its fine crystal, crisp linens and English Spode and Wedgwood china. The servers in the George Washington Room wore full-skirted white dresses with pastel embroidery.

‘It was all about the relationships’

Among the celebrities who stayed at the Inn: Liberace, Lucille Ball, Joan Collins and Duncan Hines.

Art Palmer developed long and deep business relationships – including the man who provided the small white snails from France and Switzerland, for the restaurant’s broiled Swiss escargot; various vintners in California; and the grocer (Charlie Hooley, co-founder of the Cub Foods grocery store chain) who provided the tenderloin that was used in the Matterhorn Room fondue, Bill Palmer said.

“He was a relationship guy,” he said. “For him, it was all about the relationships.”

In 1961, Art Palmer decided to take a break from the Lowell Inn and moved his wife and seven children to Topeka, Kan., to join a ranching operation.

“I was in fifth grade, and I came home, and there’s a ‘For Sale’ sign out in the front yard,” Bill Palmer said. “That was my dad. He made a decision to do something, and he just did it. He thought, ‘Well, maybe there’s something else I’d rather do. I think I want to get into the cattle business.’ Mind you, he didn’t know anything about the cattle business. … My mother was an angel.”

Art Palmer became an expert at cattle breeding and artificial insemination. A year later, the family moved back to the Stillwater area after purchasing a 175-acre farm in Grant Township. He converted it into a ranch and opened his own cattle-breeding business, importing South Devon bulls from England, Bill Palmer said.

“At one point, he had 75 bulls,” he said.

‘We accomplished a lot’

Nelle Palmer died in 1970, and Art and Maureen Palmer took over the operation of the business. They were helped by nine children — all of whom worked during their high school and college years.

The Palmers sold the hotel to Minneapolis-based Semper Lowell Associates in 1990, but the couple continued operating the Inn until they retired in June 1998.

“We accomplished a lot and made a lot of friends,” Art Palmer Jr. told the Pioneer Press in 1998. “I don’t know what more anyone can expect from a business career.”

Dickie and Judith Anderson, who own St. Croix Boat & Packet Co., bought the Lowell Inn from Semper Lowell Associates in 2000.

Palmer was preceded in death by his wife, Maureen, who died in 1998. He is survived by his nine children, Bill Palmer, Lee Tidman, Lorah Titterud, Mary Simon, Sue Jacobson, Ann de St. Aubin, Nelle Thompson, Steve Palmer and Devon Dressely; 27 grandchildren and 32 great-grandchildren

A private family Mass will be held at a later date; Simonet Funeral Home in Stillwater is handling arrangements.