| Additional Information: | 2015- This two-and-one-half-story farmhouse is of frame construction, sheathed in clapboard and wood shingle, with a dressed limestone foundation. Asphalt shingles cover the hip-and-gable roof. Windows are a combination of one-over-one, double-hung sash; fixed picture windows with stained glass transoms; and awnings, all with original wood surrounds. A shed roof porch with turned supports is located on the front (north) facade. Both the front facade and the west (side) elevation feature asymmetrical gables with octagonal shingles and decorative king post braces, and there is a two-story cutaway bay on the east end of the front facade.
The farm has three outbuildings. A c.1890 gable roof barn is located to the southwest of the house. It is of frame construction, clad in vertical wood board, on a raised stone foundation. The barn features fixed six-pane windows that appear original to the building. Immediately south of the house there is a c.1945 detached hip roof garage. To its southeast is a shed with an aluminum roof that may have been a chicken coop. It is possible that additional extant outbuildings were not visible from the right-of-way.
2019 City of Fitchburg survey recommendation write-up:
Rising two-and-one-half stories, this Queen Anne-style house is sheathed with clapboard. Rising from a cut-stone foundation, the front-facing gable features canted corners and carved wooden brackets that support the upper half-story which is sheathed with decorative shinglework. The gabled peak is further accentuated by a carved wooden bargeboard and kingpost trim. The open, shed-roof porch includes turned wooden supports but is without a balustrade/railing. Double-hung windows are found throughout much of the house, with the central windows of the front-facing gable retaining their upper fixed pane featuring small, colored-glass panes. Along one of the basement’s fieldstone and plastered walls is Alfred Bitney’s signature, along with his handprint (although no date). Also located on the property is a board-and batten-sheathed, bank barn (1919) that rests on an earlier stone foundation. Previous to the home’s tri-color scheme, the house was white.
This house is believed to have been built for Alfred C. and Marian Bitney circa 1887, with a reported rebuild circa 1900. Bitney, a Civil War veteran, was born in New York in 1837, the son of Canadian immigrants. Between 1850 and 1860, Bitney and his older brother Eli moved to Fitchburg, where they resided briefly with the Fitchburg postmaster, John Salisbury. In 1860, Alfred wed Norwegian-born Marian Johnson and they settled in Dunn, Dane County and together they had four children. Alfred, a farmer, purchased the subject property from the Waldron family at some point between 1883 and 1885, at which time a house is believed to already have been on the property (per plat maps). A somewhat significant rise in tax roll valuation—from $470 to $700—would seem suggest that some construction occurred on the property between 1886 and 1887. Valuation thereafter did not noticeably change such that it would suggest that new construction occurred. To further complicate things, local accounts indicate that both the house and the barn had fires “sometime around 1900” and the barn’s last fire occurred in 1919, at which time it was rebuilt again. Between 1904 and 1905, the Bitneys sold the property to William and Elizabeth Dick and moved to Madison. Alfred and Marian died in January and March of 1917, respectively. Elizabeth Dick died in 1943 and William passed two years later. The house remained in the Dick family into at least the 1970s, having passed in 1943 to William and Elizabeth’s son Walter and his wife Alma.
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| Bibliographic References: | For footnotes to 2019 survey write-up below, See the Historical & Architectural Resources Survey, City of Fitchburg, Dane County, Wisconsin, by Traci E. Schnell/tes | Historical Consulting, LLC, completed in 2019. |
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