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State Register of Historic Places — New Listings
The State Register of Historic Places is Wisconsin's official listing of state properties determined to be significant to Wisconsin's heritage and is maintained by the Wisconsin Historical Society's Division of Historic Preservation-Public History. The State Historic Preservation Review Board meets quarterly to review and approve nominations to the state and national registers of historic places. Listings include sites, buildings, structures, objects and districts that are significant in national, state or local history, architecture, archaeology, engineering and culture. The board recently approved the following properties for listing in the State Register of Historic Places:
- The Gund Brewing Company Bottling Works in La Crosse (pictured above) was at the forefront of the modernization of the beer-bottling industry. In its bottling works building, the brewery incorporated a modern bottling line with innovative machinery that placed it ahead of its peers and in league with the industry giants. Designed by Louis Lehle, one of the nation's leading brewery architects, the bottling facility had a high level of organization in the bottling line, and the design and layout were based on production standards permitted by electrification. Earlier plants had been limited to organization around a central steam-driven power source. This modern bottling line enabled the Gund Brewing Company to become a leader in producing and maintaining a high-quality beer that had a dependable shelf life and could be distributed to markets internationally. In 2006-2007, Gorman & Company, a Madison-based development company, converted the building into apartments using the federal preservation tax credit program The Gund Brewing Company Bottling Works has now also been listed in the National Register of Historic Places.
- Goeres Park was created in 1935 when the village of Lodi purchased 20 acres of marsh and pastureland for the future site of a new municipal water treatment plant and a new multi-use municipal park. Using WPA work-relief funds to build the park, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Landscape Architecture Franz A. Aust, known for his advocacy of naturalistic landscaping and for his use of native planting materials, planned the project. Aust dedicated the smaller, western portion of the park to contemplative use, while the land on the east side was assigned to more active use. Aust straightened the course of the creek running through the park and lined its shores with locally quarried sandstone. The site was then graded, leveled and rimmed with limestone retaining walls, and a large lagoon/swimming pool was dug out. Additional projects included the planting of hundreds of trees and shrubs on the newly worked grounds and the construction of stone bleachers overlooking a new athletic field on the east side.
- The West Side School is one of only two remaining historic school buildings in Rhinelander. The oldest part of the building was completed in 1924. The school's footprint was more than doubled with an almost mirror addition in 1939. The unified facade is of a simplified Collegiate Gothic design, a popular choice for school buildings of the period. The main block of the building embodies the principals of good school design of the era by maximizing air and light for the ease of reading and writing and for promoting good health. The kindergarten classroom in the 1939 addition was exemplary in its design and detail, featuring tall bay window with seating, a fireplace for storytelling and hand-painted tiles depicting Grimm's fables. The school was further expanded with the addition of a gymnasium in 1988, but the school closed in 2005. In 2007 Commonwealth Development Corporation of Fond du Lac used the federal preservation tax credit program for the conversion of the building to senior apartments.
- The Big Bay Sloop Shipwreck is the remains of a small, unidentified sloop that rests in 25 feet of water within Madeline Island's Big Bay in Lake Superior. Tentatively identified as a Huron boat following its discovery in the 1990s, a later archaeological survey, as well as a review of historic records, failed to positively identify the vessel type or name, but suggest the vessel is a type of vernacular sloop rather than a Huron boat. The uncertainty in identifying the vessel type is due to an almost complete absence of either historical or contemporary documentation of small craft on the Great Lakes. The Big Bay Sloop is the only one of its type known to exist in Wisconsin waters, making it a significant archaeological resource.
Other properties approved by the State Historic Preservation Review Board were Jabodon (a summer house) in the town of Washington in Vilas County, Lodi School Hillside Improvement Site in Columbia County, and Salsbury Row House in Eau Claire. All of these properties were then forwarded to the National Park Service for approval and listing in the National Register of Historic Places.
You can discover other Wisconsin properties listed in the state and national registers from your community on our website, where you can also find more information about how properties are nominated to the registers.
:: Posted January 22, 2009
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