| 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 Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office.
2019: This cream brick Queen Anne house was built for William and Anna (Ann) Meadows in 1898 and completed within the year. The Honorable William Meadows had come to America as a child in 1850, and his family were wool farmers. In 1889 William and his brother George, with their friend Edward Brook, bought into the Burlington Brick and Tile Company, and five years later, he and Edward Brook were among the incorporators of the Brook-Barlow Investment Company. William Meadows was by this time a very wealthy man and announced his intention to build this residence in the Burlington Free Press, August 31, 1898.
There are three other houses that are similar to this one in Burlington. The designers and builders are unknown. The four house consist of a central cube with gabled cross wings, a wrap-around porch that curves on the corners, and a balcony on the second level. They have large double-hung windows, and the sweeping porch rook is supported on slender columns.
After a lifetime of public service--including chairing both the school board and town of Lyons, being a member of the State Assembly in 1881, and delegate to various county, congressional, state and national conventions, and finally, alderman of the second ward in Burlington--William Meadows deeded the house to his children in 1920, who were unable to sell it and began its life as a defacto apartment building. In 1924, it was purchase by John W. and Sarah Peters, who announced their intention to make it into a "two-flat building." They lived in one flat and leased out the other. When they lost the building to foreclosure in 1939, it was acquired by local historian Howard A. Wood, who remodeled it to three flats and rented it out but chose not to live there himself. However, he took good photographs of it and the similar houses for his book, Burlington, its Early History, Growth and Progress (a manufacturing center), published in 1908. The house remained in Wood's family until 1959. |
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