FARGO — Bill and Mary Weiler needed a new house.
With two young children in one bedroom and a third baby on its way, the young Fargo family was rapidly outgrowing their small, two-bedroom home.
One afternoon, Bill came home and told Mary, “I think there’s a house that you need to see.”
The house at 1121 Fourth Ave. S. was a 1902 Queen Anne-style residence perched on a generous corner lot. Its most striking feature was an octagonal three-story tower rising up from a large, wrap-around porch.
Mary walked in — and cringed at the unsightly green shag carpeting. Then she noticed the leaded and stained-glass windows, the rich woodwork and the seemingly endless space.
“I went up to the second floor and I just looked around and I didn’t even go up to the third floor. I said, ‘This is it,’” she recalls, smiling.
That was in 1970. The Weilers raised their eight children there and become a fixture in the south Fargo neighborhood inhabited by well-kept Victorian-era houses and huge trees. It was a neighborhood where kids played outside from dusk ’til dawn, and they knew every neighbor on their block.
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
But now the Weiler offspring are grown and on their own. Bill, a well-known music teacher and director,
And a five-bedroom, 4,233-square-foot home is a lot for one person to manage.
Even for a person like Mary, who — in between raising a big family — earned a master’s degree and worked her way up from receptionist at Luther Hall to a vice president at Lutheran Social Services of North Dakota.
But Mary is also undergoing treatment for esophageal cancer, so she is ready to downsize. This month, she’ll relocate to the Highpointe Apartments in north Fargo, where her sister also lives.
Now the Weiler house is on the market for $475,000. Its charm is considerable. Think grand main-floor doorways with pocket doors, original woodwork and molding, stained and leaded glass, 9-foot-high ceilings, pristine hardwood floors, a butler’s pantry, five bedrooms, a fully finished basement and — perhaps its crowning feature — an octagonal, third-floor tower bedroom paneled in original dark-stained beadboard.
All they need is the right family to buy the much-loved, carefully tended place they’ve called home for 55 years.
Since listing the place over a month ago, the property has attracted over 4,200 views on Zillow alone. They’ve also had several showings.
“People have loved it,” says Mary. “But they haven’t come back for a second time.”
The house that shoes built
The home was first built for K.M. Hagen, a Norwegian shoemaker who emigrated to the United States in 1887 and opened a shoe store at 420 Front Street (now Main Avenue).
His venture must have been successful, as it allowed Hagen to build a grand home where he and his wife, Anna, raised six children.
Anna recalled in a 1957 Forum article that when they first purchased the land for their home, people laughed at them for building “way out in the country.”
The house was designed by A.J. O’Shea, a Fargo architect who designed the upper floors of the DeLendrecies department store (now Block Six) at 620 Main Ave.
Years ago, when the Weilers were out working in their garden, a man pulled over and introduced himself. He was Frank Hagen Jr., K.M. and Anna’s grandson. Hagen Jr. told the Weilers about his family’s most talented family member: Bertha Hagen Dunnigan. The daughter of K.M. and Anna, Hagen Dunnigan grew up to be an acclaimed concert pianist, music teacher and accompanist who passed away at age 45 in her parents’ home after a long illness.
File photo
Hagen Dunnigan studied in Berlin with Josef Lhevinne, a Russian piano virtuoso, and later provided accompaniment and concert work for performers like Gladys Swarthout, a Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano.
She co-owned the Dakota Music Conservatory in Fargo for several years, later headed her own music studio in the First National Bank building and also gave lessons in her family’s home.
”She had a grand piano in the parlor and that’s where she gave the lessons for the opera singers,” Mary says.
Many decades later, the Weilers also filled the front parlor with music. “All the kids played instruments and sang, so the music continued on even from a hundred years ago,” Mary says.
The family’s musical bent began with Bill, who served as director of music for the Fargo Diocese, directed the schola cantorum at St. Mary’s Cathedral and later became known as “Doc Weiler” to the seminarians at the (now closed) Cardinal Muench Seminary in Fargo.
The next generation of Weilers have carried on that artistic tradition. Mark Weiler founded Ecce Gallery in downtown Fargo and now runs the Nemeth Art Gallery in Park Rapids, Minn. Brenda Weiler, who also owns Ecce Yoga in Fargo, is a well-known local singer-songwriter. Another brother, Michael, was the front man for local band Slippy McGee.
What lies beneath (the carpet)
While the Weiler home has been updated, one suspects it doesn’t look dramatically different from years ago — thanks to its heirloom furnishings, plethora of old family photos and lack of modern clutter. The formal front foyer showcases an open staircase with beautifully preserved oak railing and carved newell post.
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
The stairs lead up to a landing highlighted by an oval rose window — also sometimes called a “wheel window” because the mullions radiate outward like wheel spokes. “That’s very typical of Queen Anne design,” Mary says.
Below the window rests a carved wooden pedestal, once used as a music podium by Bill when he conducted the choir at St. Mary’s Cathedral in downtown Fargo.
The foyer flows into the formal front parlor/music room, which could be closed off with pocket doors.
The most remarkable feature of this space is the hardwood flooring, laid in long diagonal planks and bordered around the edge by thin, alternating strips of light maple and darker walnut woods.
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
The Weilers learned this floor treatment was so elaborate that people typically only used it in one or two rooms of a Victorian home. But the Hagens splurged and used it in four rooms, including the foyer, living room and formal dining room too.
The Weilers bought the house before even discovering this hidden treasure beneath their feet.
“We had ordered some really good carpeting,” Mary recalls. “One day I said to Bill, ‘Let’s go pull up the corner over there. I’m curious to see what’s underneath,’ and that’s what we found. And then we canceled the carpet order.”
The formal dining room was also built to impress. Guests walked through oversized double doors, where they were greeted by a substantial, built-in china hutch and an elegant beveled-glass piano window flanked by two tall double-hung windows.
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
Early on, Bill and Mary decided to knock down a wall between the kitchen and a room in the northwest corner to create a breakfast room. At one time, it held a table long enough to seat all 10 members of the Weiler family.
Today, the kitchen is a mix of yesteryear charm and new convenience. Quartz countertops, updated appliances, new flooring and a tile backsplash were added in recent years, but the sturdy cabinetry and still-handy butler’s pantry are remnants of another time.
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
The home is filled with original art and mementos. Bill mentored two Cardinal Muench seminarians who went on to become artists: Fargo-born landscape artist George Pfeifer and Langdon, N.D.-born John Martineau. When Martineau passed away in 1995, his sister, Lily Martineau, sent rolls and rolls of her brother’s work to Bill, which he had framed.
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
The Weiler home also contains a
piece as well as 15th- and 16th-century musical manuscripts from Bill’s travels abroad to the Vatican and Austria in the 1950s.
“They are in the process of dividing all the art among the kids,” Brenda says.
A room at the top of the world
The high point — both literally and figuratively — is the third-floor “tower room,” an octagonal haven that is finished on all sides with walnut beadboard.
Mary had heard that this space was originally used as a chapel, “which apparently was not unusual to have in older homes.”
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
She explains that the prized roost typically went to the oldest boy living in the house at the time. Youngest son, Mark, who was the last in line to get the coveted room, remembered it as a sort of sanctuary. “Typically for the person who had this room, it was kind of like, shut the door and no would could come in,” he recalls.
The Weiler girls also slept in the lofted spaces of the third floor. “We moved around all the time, because we shared rooms a lot,” Brenda recalls. “And then if one would graduate, then we could move and start to separate and have our own rooms. But I don’t think I had my own room until junior high.”
With its four floors, 64 steps (including finished basement) and 34 windows, one wonders how Mary handled it all. “Yeah, the kids did their chores, but I worked really hard on maintaining it,” she says. “I used to love to polish the wood and I loved to walk with bare feet on these floors. It’s just a wonderful feeling.”
Alyssa Goelzer / The Forum
The home has even sometimes symbolized her own passing of time. “Through the years, I sometimes sit and notice the change in the wood and how it’s aging along with me,” she adds.
So even though selling the house makes logical sense, it will also be bittersweet.
“I’ve just cherished the time I’ve been here. But thank God for memories,” she says. “Because I have all the memories of the house and they’ll be with me forever. You can’t take that away.”
Learn more about the Weiler house at
https://www.oldhousedreams.com/2025/06/11/1902-queen-anne-in-fargo-nd/.
