Keystone Block
Keystone Block circa 1870
Built: 1867
National Register of Historic Places: 1979
Architectural Style: Italianate
Architect/Builder: Daniel C. Hill
Currently: DeLeon Jewelers
The Keystone Building is one of the most striking buildings in downtown Red Wing, with its sixteen Italianate style stone arches.
Inside, it housed many of Red Wing’s significant early businesses, including the Pierce & Simmons Bank, and the office of Dr. Charles Nathaniel Hewitt.
Pierce & Simmons were not the first bankers in Red Wing, but their bank would eventually have a bigger impact on the town, when they donated the land on Barn Bluff/He Mni Can to be set aside for a city park.
Dr. Hewitt, for his part, was the Keystone tenant with the biggest impact in Red Wing. A great proponent of hygiene and sanitation, Hewitt helped establish, and spent 25 years in charge of, the Minnesota Board of Health. He was also a driving force behind the first smallpox vaccines in Red Wing.
Dr. Charles Nathaniel Hewitt
Hewitt used a process where he would infect a cow with smallpox and wait for its sores to burst. He would then make a small scrape on the skin of his human patients and spread the fluids from the cow’s sore on the patient’s fresh wound.
Thanks to Hewitt’s efforts, smallpox had a limited impact in Red Wing in the late 19th century.
But cows were not the only animals to cross paths with Dr. Hewitt’s practice. In November of 1869, a bear, domesticated, or at least held in captivity, by a local citizen escaped and found its way into Hewitt’s Keystone office.
The Goodhue County Republican reported that upon seeing the bear, “The Norwegian who takes care of the office beat an unusually hasty retreat.”
The bear’s owners retrieved the beast and allowed it to escape one more time on the return home. “However,” the paper said, “he was made to feel the supremacy of man, and led back to his den.”
