| Additional Information: | A 'site file' titled "Upper Lone Tree Farm Estate Historic District" 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 Wisconsin Historical Society, Division of Historic Preservation. Also see the "Guernsey Bern" site file.
THIS ENORMOUS DAIRY BARN WAS BUILT IN 1916 TO HOUSE THE GUERNSEY COWS PORTION OF THE LARGER DAIRY FARM OPERATION THAT WAS ASSOCIATED WITH VICTOR LAWSON'S UPPER LONE TREE FARM. THE BARN ORIGINALLY HAD A T-PLAN, ITS WALLS ARE CLAD IN DROP SIDING, IT HAS A WOOD SHINGLE-CLAD GAMBREL ROOF, AND ITS TWIN SILOS ARE BUILT OUT OF GLAZED STRUCTURAL CLAY TILES.
THE GAMBREL-ROOFED EAST WING OF THIS BARN NOW HAS A SEPARATE AHI# (147826) AND WAS ERECTED c. 1993, FOLLOWING THE DEMOLITION OF THE ORIGINAL EAST WING. THE ORIGINAL EAST HYPHEN REMAINS.
This extraordinarily stylish Wisconsin Dairy Barn was once part of Upper Lone Tree Farm on the Lone Tree Farm Estate, encompassing 1,100 acres. Jessie Bradley Lawson developed this land on the shore of the lake where she had vacationed as a child. Green Lake is Wisconsin’s deepest spring-fed glacial lake, and along its banks, between 1860 and the early 1890s, arose the state’s oldest resort community.
In 1901, Lawson and her husband Victor began assembling land for this estate, and then transformed lake frontage, woodlands, fields, and pastures into a bucolic paradise, complete with thirty swans and a nine-hole golf course. More than two dozen buildings and structures remain, including the greenhouse (1906), boathouse (1910), tea house (1910), stone walls along roadways, and seven water towers, one of which has an observation platform that commands a dramatic view of the Lawsons’ country retreat. The estate had two working model farms: Point Farm, at the south end of the estate near Green Lake, and the Upper Lone Tree Farm at the north end of the estate. The Guernsey barn is a contributing resource in the potential Upper Lone Tree Farm Historic District.
Victor Lawson, publisher of the Chicago Daily News and co-founder of the Associated Press, believed the estate should pay for itself through farming and dairying, especially after Jessie died in 1914. Two years later, needing a place to house his Guernsey cows, Victor had this handsome two-story basement barn built on the north end of the farm. The estate’s general manager and construction superintendent, William Merigold, is credited with the design, but he drew on new ideas being promoted by the Agricultural Experiment Station at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. This barn configuration became known stylistically as the “Wisconsin Dairy Barn.” To guarantee good ventilation and plenty of sunshine, Merigold placed hipped dormers along the sides of the barn’s roof and lined the roof ridge with large ventilators, and he rhythmically pierced the clapboard side walls with pairs of small rectangular windows, marking the cattle stalls inside. The gambrel roof--which allowed for greater hayloft capacity than a gabled roof did--also adhered to university advice. Merigold, however, added unusually fashionable detail. He filled the dormers with diamond-pane sashes, and to provide access to the haymow, he installed an elegant pair of French doors with a fanlight in an arched surround in each gambrel end. The Lawsons employed this motif on all their animal barns, beginning with the Jersey barn (1908) and possible their first animal barn, the Point horse barn (1904).
In 1925, the H. O. Stone Company of Chicago purchased the estate and turned it into a country-club residential community, called Lawsonia in honor of its original developers. Many of the buildings on the grounds today date from the Stone Company’s ownership. The enterprise went bankrupt during the Great Depression. In 1943, the American Baptist Assembly acquired the property, which it operates as the Green Lake Conference Center. The interior first floor was converted into a youth conference center in 1947, with small sleeping rooms on either side of a center hallway. Golf Courses of Lawsonia acquired the Guernsey barn c. 1993, and razed the original east wing and constructed the existing east wing the same year. The building has been used for storage since that time. |
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| Bibliographic References: | Heiple, Robert W. & Emma B. A Heritage History of Beautiful Green Lake, Wisconsin. Green Lake: Heritage Edition, 1976-1977, pp. 223, 225 (photos).
Jerry Apps, Barns of Wisconsin, (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Trails, 1977), 95-96
Marsha Weisiger and Contributors, Buildings of Wisconsin, (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 395-96. |
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