Old homes, church featured on historic walking tour
Podcast Episode
Kyle Geissler talks with Janesville Gazette reporter Shelly Birkelo about the upcoming historic house and garden walking tour in Janesville's Courthouse Hill Historic District.
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The Atwood home at 215 S. Division St. is in the 2008 Historic Home and Garden Tour.
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The Harmon home at 721 E. Milwaukee is in the 2008 Historic Home and Garden Tour.
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The Riley home at 605 St. Lawrence Ave. is in the 2008 Historic Home and Garden Tour.
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The Romstad home at 719 St. Lawrence Ave. is in the 2008 Historic Home and Garden Tour.
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The Wood-Ellingson home at 17 S. Atwood Ave. is in the 2008 Historic Home and Garden Tour.
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The Trinity Episcopal Church at 409 E. Court St. is on the 2008 Historic Home and Garden tour.
JANESVILLE — It's only appropriate that proceeds from tours of homes and a church built in the 19th century benefit the Rock County Historical Society, which has a mission of preserving, advancing and sharing knowledge of this county's past.
The society's historic house and garden tour is set for Sunday, Aug. 24, in the Courthouse Hill Historic District of Janesville.
Included are Trinity Episcopal Church, which is celebrating its 160th anniversary, and five houses dating from 1859 to 1895. All are within four blocks of each other, so visitors can park their cars and take a leisurely stroll to the sites.
"You should be able to get around easily. The homes are located on the flat part of the hill," said Deb Wood-Ellingson, whose house is featured on the tour.
Additional information, including a complimentary Janesville Historic Commission publication, will be available at a table in Upper Courthouse Hill Park. Carriage rides at $2 each, ice cream and other refreshments also will be offered.
"We want to create the ambience of a Sunday afternoon of this historic area," Wood-Ellingson said.
Organizers also wanted to create a neighborhood feel for the tour. Homeowners, some dressed in period costumes, will guide tour participants through their homes.
"It's a different format than the (previous) walk in, through and out. We'll have 10 to 12 in a group at a time,” Wood-Ellingson said, and that will allow homeowners to teach people about their home's architecture and decorative arts, such as furniture.
If there is a wait, water will be available, and people will be able walk through the gardens or on to the next house on the tour, Wood-Ellingson said. Homeowners, who worked as a committee and are committed to historic preservation, hope people will leave the tour with a new appreciation of the area's history and how people lived more than a century ago, she said.
The tour features:
-- Daniel and Karen Atwood home, 215 S. Division St.
This Queen Anne-style house, dating to 1895, shows the influence of furniture designer Charles Locke Eastlake, especially in the front circular porch supported by bulbous turned posts, a second-floor balcony and sunburst motifs in the overhanging third-floor gables. The house plan is likely one of many published by architect George F. Barber.
Interior features of the home include a double-hung pressed glass window in the foyer, pocket doors in original finish, multiple bay windows, matching stained glass panels in the first- and second-story bay windows, an original ceramic tile fireplace, a restored and an original oak-paneled front staircase. First floor remodeling includes original materials and period ambiance.
-- Fred and Carol Harmon home, 721 E. Milwaukee St.
Kiron W. Bemis, a Janesville farm machinery businessman, built this Italianate house around 1885. The existing wraparound front porch was added around 1900.
The home features original woodwork throughout, most of which still has the original finish. The most elaborate woods and design details are in the front of the house, and it's more plain toward the back rooms. In the family room, a carving of "Our Home” above the set of pocket doors went unnoticed for a while. Most rooms have been decorated with Bradbury and Bradbury wallpapers, including the ceilings.
The house has an addition started that adds a three-season back porch and a future billiards room on the second level using many salvaged windows, stained glass windows, lumber, siding, hardware and other period pieces. The patio uses Janesville street brick salvaged from a dump pile.
-- Rick and Marthea Riley home, 605 St. Lawrence Ave.
Robert M. Bostwick and his wife Helen from 1859-1862 built this large cream-colored brick, Civil War Italianate-style house with its many rooms of high ceilings, Eastlake woodwork, three working fireplaces and hardwood floors.
The house, which sits on a double corner lot with a two-story carriage house behind it, is built with a hip roof and limestone foundation. Its windows are decorated with brick stilted arch hoodmolds and center keystones. The front porch has been altered at least three times, and its exterior and interior underwent major additions in 1892 and 1911.
The Rileys remodeled the kitchen in 2005, taking everything out, including seven layers of flooring. Their biggest project, however, has been in the garden that includes a walkway, patios, three Koi-filled ponds, two waterfalls and fountain rock.
-- David and Judith Romstad home, 719 St. Lawrence Ave.
This 2½-story frame Victorian home with Queen Anne and Neo-classic features was built in 1888. It features a multi-planed roof, tall brick chimneys, two working fireplaces, horizontal siding and an encircling porch. The porch, with simple balusters and Corinthian columns, is typically Neo-classic. The southeast corner of the home features a turret room used for the storage of books and trunks.
This Victorian was moved in two parts from South Main Street, site of the Carnegie Library, up Courthouse Hill to its current site. Joseph Bostwick, a partner in the family clothing business, vice president of the Rock County Telephone Co. and a director of the Old Line Life Insurance Co., was the owner at the time of the move.
-- Duke Ellingson and Deb Wood-Ellingson home, 17 S. Atwood Ave.
This Queen Anne-style home was built in 1888 by contractor/builder Luther C. Clark and is one of many homes, churches and commercial buildings he built in Janesville.
Its front-facing gable, asymmetrical appearance with turret, arched porch features, patterned shingles, stained glass transom windows, divided window lights, bay windows, third-floor open porch and decorative chimneys reflect the home's Victorian style.
Highlighting the homes many features are six working fireplaces and a grand, open center staircase that ascends the home's three floors and is crowned by an 8-by-8-foot skylight.
Guests also will get to see a billiard room and period furniture along with light fixtures that are either from the original home or period replicas, including the newel post light in the reception hall.
A Victorian swan base fountain can be seen in the Victorian gardens along with a unique crested gazebo on the brick patio.
Trinity Episcopal Church, 409 E. Court St.
This church, which features stained glass windows and a prayer garden, was built in 1931 and remains the only church in the Courthouse Hill Historic District. It was renovated from 1978-79, and Ortmayer Hall was built in 1964.
The church had the first pipe organ in Janesville, which cost $1,000, the first marble alter in Wisconsin and the first "vested choir in the West."
More history of the church and details of its stained-glass windows will be explained during the tour.
IF YOU GO
Who: The Rock County Historical Society.
What: 28th Historic House and Garden Tour.
When: Noon to 5 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 24.
Where: Five homes and one church in the Courthouse Hill Historic Preservation District of Janesville.
Tickets: $15 in advance at the Helen Jeffris Wood Museum Center, 426 N. Jackson St., Janesville, or day of the event at House Tour Central in Upper Courthouse Hill Park.
Aug 26, 2008 at 11:13 a.m.
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Did they ever restore the Victorian house vacated by the YWCA located on Lawrence? I think it was initially built by a lumber baron and the door frame to each room was a different kind of wood with the nut/seed of that particular tree carved on one side and the flower on the other. Pocket doors, servant's staircase, cupola and the parquet flooring was amazing. A parquet railroad track ringed the edge of the children's room. Love it!
Aug 5, 2008 at 8:01 p.m.
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You really need to check out the home for sale on Wisconsin,by Shorewest Realtors. It has a double staircase and is definate must see.
Aug 5, 2008 at 1:45 p.m.
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My husband and I recently bought a home downtown that is over 100 years old. We are really looking forward to the tours! I wish there were more people interested in preserving these beautiful historic homes!
Aug 4, 2008 at 4:11 p.m.
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no different house near a park by vanbureon
Aug 4, 2008 at 3:42 p.m.
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hannah, yes the hutch was custom built, although not for the historical house; it was the identification as an antique that was incorrect. The owners probably just assumed that the hutch was built with the house, since there was a niche that seemed to have no other purpose than to contain the hutch. When, in fact, the hutch had been built years before we even moved into the house and it was just coincidence that the niche was the perfect size. Coincidentally our old house was also split into 2 upstairs apartments when we bought it (maybe hannah is even referring to the same house?). I remember my room being an entire apartment all to myself (except when we had guests).
When I say take the tour info with a grain of salt, I don't mean to insult the tour guides. It's not like they lie or intentionally try to distort the info, it's just that they don't always have a written historical account of building renovations and original designs, so they have to make assumptions (like with my dads hutch). It's as with any field of historical reconstruction, the story all depends on what kind of assumptions you make (I could go on for hours about radioactive dating, etc, but I digress).
Aug 4, 2008 at 3:22 p.m.
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we gutted our bath down to the studs and this was written on the stud "ed (some name i cant remember right now) electrcian 1903"
Aug 4, 2008 at 2:11 p.m.
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The guided tours are a great idea! I never understood the idea of people just milling about in a house. A turn of the century Sunday afternoon in Courthouse Hill, with a carriage ride and some ice cream, what more could you ask.
Aug 4, 2008 at 1:35 p.m.
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Unless the new owners had to repair the hutch, there is likely no way that they had to know it was a later addition. Instead of criticizing the tour guides (who are generally friends or relatives of the owners, and not in any way paid professionals), you should be quietly proud that your dad built something that was so in character with the house that it looked original.
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One thing that house restorers can do is write their name and the date on new construction before it is stained or painted, or on an inconspicuous hidden area. That way years in the future somebody will be able to learn the history of the house as they work on it themselves.
Aug 4, 2008 at 1:12 p.m.
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the tour guides on this tour ARE the owners of the home.
i do agree with the tour guide thing to take with a grain of salt though. We have gone to 10 chimneys and some stuff was a little hard to believe. i am sure as a story is told over and over for many years it can change a bit as people intrepert it differently. like fables or rumars.
Aug 4, 2008 at 1:10 p.m.
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ktaustin- they only do about 5 or 6 houses a year on a tour. the house wasnt just left out.
i dont understand why you think tour guide was giving miss imformation. your dad did custom build it. do you mean she said custom built when the house was built?
youll see with old homes things and trim, doors , rooms etc will change over time. i have an ornate archway with wood trim between two rooms in the 60's they say this way done and the original pocket doors are in the walls now . styles change and people change things. some of the older homes had been built then added onto as they could afford it. i know of a house that was a whole house but split into an apartment WAY back in 20's
because the husband and wife built the home then he died. she didnt want to leave the home so slpit the upstairs into an apartment so she could afford it. it was neat to find that out. i thought this was going on in more recent times for rental income.
i was on the tour one year. there was a lady who lived in the house and her husband and her were married in the old house in the 40's. rent was $12 a month. they are both still alive . I called her to tell her about the tour and she came to the tour with her daughters. very neat. I think theyre in their 80's
Aug 4, 2008 at 11:44 a.m.
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I have a funny story about one of these tours. My family used to live in one of these historic houses when I was a kid, on Court St. not far from Trinity church but I forget the address (I believe it is now a bed and breakfast). Years after moving out, some of my family thought it would be fun to tour our old house, and as we got near the kitchen area the tour guide pointed out a beautiful antique hutch custom built into this niche. Whats funny is that my dad built the hutch (I think in the '80s), and after moving into the Court St. house found that this niche was almost the perfect size for the hutch. He had to rip off the floor trim to get it to fit. I didn't see the house listed so maybe the current owners don't want to participate in the tour.
Just evidence to take what tour guides tell you with a grain of salt.
Aug 4, 2008 at 10:02 a.m.
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this tours new style will be better than before. dont miss it!!!
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