Property Record
804 MACFARLANE RD
Architecture and History Inventory
| Historic Name: | William and Jessie Breese House |
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| Other Name: | Museum at the Portage |
| Contributing: | Yes |
| Reference Number: | 3675 |
| Location (Address): | 804 MACFARLANE RD |
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| County: | Columbia |
| City: | Portage |
| Township/Village: | |
| Unincorporated Community: | |
| Town: | |
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| Year Built: | 1912 |
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| Additions: | 1928 1949 |
| Survey Date: | 1990 |
| Historic Use: | house |
| Architectural Style: | Colonial Revival/Georgian Revival |
| Structural System: | |
| Wall Material: | Brick |
| Architect: | HEIMERL, JULIUS E. |
| Other Buildings On Site: | |
| Demolished?: | No |
| Demolished Date: |
| National/State Register Listing Name: | Society Hill Historic District |
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| National Register Listing Date: | 3/5/1992 |
| State Register Listing Date: | 1/22/1992 |
| National Register Multiple Property Name: |
| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the State Historical Society, Division of Historic Preservation. The present-day site of Portage was a strategic location from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Here explorers, fur traders, and travelers portaged--that is, carried their boats overland--between the Fox River route to the Great Lakes and the Wisconsin River route to the Mississippi. In the mid-nineteenth century, the portage became a canal, and soon after, with the coming of the La Crosse and Milwaukee Railroad (now the Soo Line) in the 1850s, the city of Portage itself emerged as a prosperous railroad and trading center. Between 1870 and 1910, the town’s most prominent families built elegant brick houses in an area now known as Society Hill. Most are in the Italianate and Queen Anne styles, but sprinkled among the high-style houses are more vernacular dwellings, along with a number of Craftsman bungalows. Among the most notable houses on Society Hill is the Zona Gale-William Breese House (804 MacFarlane Rd.), which later became the Portage Free Library. A nationally acclaimed author, Zona Gale won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for her play Miss Lulu Bett. Of small towns like Portage, she wrote: "A town may be less a place than a force, less a force than a fragrance." Small towns permeated the senses, “not only of the eye and the memory, but of other and far more sensitive cells and powers." The year she published those reflective words, Gale moved into this red-brick house, designed in 1912 by Julius E. Heimerl of Milwaukee for her husband, William Breese, and his first wife, Jessie. Their Colonial Revival house has a stately formality, conveyed by a steeply-pitched hipped roof with gabled dormers, monumental chimneys, a denticulated cornice, and arched windows trimmed with decorative balconets. Heimerl designed a partly-stuccoed north addition as a writing studio. The interior of this room features Neo-Tudor woodwork executed by carpenter Otto Kraemer of Baraboo. Additional photo code: Neg. file 376/P7-3. STUDY AND MASTER SUITE WERE BUILT IN 1928. |
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| Bibliographic References: | PORTAGE 1986 LANDMARK CALENDAR. PORTAGE DAILY REGISTER 1/2/1995. PORTAGE DAILY REGISTER 1/31/1995. Buildings of Wisconsin manuscript. |
| Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory, State Historic Preservation Office, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison, Wisconsin |