Terrace Hill National Register of Historic Places Listing

Benjamin Franklin Allen wanted to brag. As Iowa's first millionaire, he commissioned Chicago architect William W. Boyington in 1866 to build a home that would announce his immense wealth to the entire frontier. The result was a Second Empire palace. Workers spent three years hauling limestone, cream-colored brick, and massive plates of glass to a hill overlooking Des Moines, racking up a $250,000 bill before its completion in 1869. That was real money back then. Actually, the final price tag equaled about five million dollars in today's currency, featuring a towering ninety-foot spire and a massive, twenty-five-foot-tall stained-glass window dominating the grand staircase. Pure, unadulterated Victorian excess.

But Allen's financial empire crashed just a few years later, forcing him to sell his dream home to insurance tycoon F.M. Hubbell in 1884. Hubbell loved the place. He set up a trust to keep the estate in his family forever, ensuring that the ornate hand-carved woodwork, plaster medallions, and gaslight fixtures remained intact through the early twentieth century. His heirs eventually realized they couldn't afford it. In 1971, the Hubbell family bypassed the trust and donated the massive property to the State of Iowa, turning a private monument of the Gilded Age into public property. It became the governor's mansion. Governor Robert D. Ray moved his family into the third floor in 1976, initiating a dual-purpose era where the top floor housed the state's leader while the bottom two floors became a public museum.

The federal government took notice. In 2003, the National Park Service designated Terrace Hill as a National Historic Landmark, recognizing its status as one of the finest surviving examples of Second Empire architecture in the entire United States. It isn't just about pretty bricks. The home represents the wild economic swings of the Midwest, shifting from a Gilded Age status symbol to a white elephant, and finally to a living piece of state history. Today, the governor still sleeps upstairs. Downstairs, tour guides lead visitors past the original brass chandeliers and imported marble fireplaces, showing how Iowa's elite lived when the state was young. History you can actually walk through.