Highlights Archives
State Register of Historic Places: New Listings
In October the State Historic Preservation Review Board recommended approval of seven new listings in the State Register of Historic Places, Wisconsin's official listing of state properties determined to be significant to Wisconsin's heritage. The Society's Division of Historic Preservation-Public History maintains the list, and the review board meets quarterly to review new property nominations. Listings include sites, buildings, structures, objects and districts that are significant in national, state or local history, architecture, archaeology, engineering and culture. The State Historic Preservation Officer submits State Register properties to the National Park Service, which considers the properties for addition to the National Register of Historic Places. Following are more details about the seven properties added to the State Register last month.
Albert and Alice Bellack House, Columbus, Columbia County
Albert M. Bellack, owner of a successful store in downtown Columbus, built a Queen Anne-style house on one of city's most important streets in 1896. The house was essentially unchanged until the early 1920s, when the Bellacks' travels to the Southwest introduced them to Mission-style architecture. Upon their return, Bellack purchased the adjacent two corner lots and began transforming his house into a Mission-style structure. The result is the elaborate Mission-style transformation of the south and east sides of the house reclad in stucco. The transformation is all the more interesting for being incomplete, since the north and west sides of the house remain as they were originally. Today the exterior of the house, shown above, is still highly intact as is much of the interior, which also reflects the same partial transformation.
Cardy Site, Sturgeon Bay, Door County
The Cardy Site is an Early Paleoindian-stage campsite, dated to the period between 10,800-11,200 radiocarbon years ago. The site, located on the modern Door Peninsula between Green Bay and Lake Michigan south of Sturgeon Bay, stood in an ice-margin habitat in close proximity to the wasting Green Bay and Lake Michigan lobes of the late Wisconsinan continental ice sheet. Properties like the Cardy Site provide significant information about human occupation during the earliest periods of settlement in the region. The Cardy family has protected the site since learning of its significance in the early 1960s and is currently developing plans for its long-term preservation.
Minertown, Town of Carter, Forest County
Vernon County brothers Wilbur and Henry T. Miner, with the assistance of their sister Mary, established Minertown in 1899, soon after the Chicago and North Western Railroad expanded into Forest County. They purchased a 4,000-acre tract of hardwood-covered land from the railroad and constructed a sawmill. The settlement began with a boarding house and company store and grew to include a planing mill, roundhouse, depot, store, blacksmith shop, cook shanty, several small four-room houses and a barn. Many of the original settlers came with the Miners from the Kickapoo Valley in Vernon County while others came from Kentucky.
Until 1922, when the Oconto Company acquired the facility, the mills produced saw lumber for at least one company, the Menasha Woodenware Company. On June 11, 1931, a fire attributed to a carelessly discarded cigarette destroyed the mill. Mill workers from Minertown and Carter subsequently moved away, finding work with other lumber companies, and had completely abandoned the town by 1939. What remains is an archaeological site that can tell us about the physical structure and people of a lumber company town.
St. Andrew's Church, Town of LeRoy, Dodge County
Hailed by one of its pastors as the "Cathedral of the Marsh," St. Andrew's is a large and impressive Gothic Revival-style church that rises majestically out of farm fields that surround it. Located only a few miles from the famed Horicon Marsh, it was the center of religious and social life for generations of ethnic German farmers in the area.
In 1899 St. Andrew's congregation chose architect Anton Dohmen to design a new church. Dohmen excelled in the design and ornamentation of large churches and gave the congregation a distinctive building with all the trappings of the Gothic Revival style: pointed arch openings, buttresses and towers. On the interior, Dohmen designed a high and impressive vaulted ceiling, including a structural rib vault much like those found in medieval churches. It was 1912, however, before the congregation could raise donations for more than 20 stained-glass windows from the noted Emil Frei Art Glass Company of St. Louis. It was not until 1922 before it could finish the professional decoration of the interior with works of art, small figural murals and medallions.
Other Properties Listed:
- Mt. Horeb Public School, Mt. Horeb, Dane County
- Reinhard and Amelia Schendel House, Columbus, Columbia County
- Frances Kurth Sharrow House, Columbus, Columbia County
:: Posted November 16, 2009
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