Wisconsin

In 1935, Jens Jensen founded The Clearing as a school-in-the-woods offering courses in landscape design, nature studies, and various arts, including weaving and painting. The campus, encompassing 125 acres, was originally Jensen’s summer estate.

Founded in 1915, the Amity Leather Products Company specialized in billfolds and handbags. It first prospered, however, when it landed a contract to make leather vests for the armed forces during World War I. By 1924, the company had grown sufficiently to build this factory, whose Moderne lines became even more apparent with the completion of the tower in 1929. Dolke, of Chicago, created a composition of flat-roofed brown brick blocks that step up to dramatize the tower’s verticality. Stepped buttresses and pilasters ascend to the tower’s full height.

A seven-stage tower soars above the three-story courthouse designed by Koch of Milwaukee in Richardsonian Romanesque with German Renaissance touches. Rising above a typical Richardsonian arched entrance, each stage of the tower is distinguished by different heights and by differently shaped voids: rectangles, narrow arches, and slits. At the sixth stage, pinnacles with steeply pitched pyramidal roofs at each corner frame an inset wooden balcony. At the top, the pyramidal roof rises in two stages, the second forming a belvedere.

West Bend City Hall is an impressive high-style municipal building for such a small city. Van Ryn and de Gelleke of Milwaukee, who won a regional design contest, opted for a small-scale German Renaissance Revival composition, suggested by the Germanic origins of many of the city’s residents. The cream brick building is two-and-a-half stories in height with a side-gabled roof, but its belvedere and its gabled wall dormer, flanked by smaller dormers with semicircular iron hoods, make it appear taller.

In 1867, Jacob Ritger opened his wagon-making shop in the crossroads village of St. Lawrence to serve the surrounding agricultural region. His commodious one-and-a-half-story shop is constructed of split fieldstones, laid with ample mortar. Boulders tie the thick walls together at the corners, and segmental-arched lintels of yellow brick support most of the window and door openings. The field-stone and yellow brick create a colorful appearance. Attic windows light the upper level. Ritger used the double-door opening on the south side to get materials into the shop and finished wagons out.

This house expresses a Germanic folk idiom common throughout southeastern Wisconsin’s countryside: fieldstone construction. The Pinions, immigrants from Prussia, built this vernacular house for their family, which included their seven children and Nickolas’s mother. Four rooms are on each floor, arranged more or less symmetrically. Fieldstone is abundant throughout this glaciated area of the state. During the most recent advance of the continental ice sheet, glaciers deposited tons of basalt, granite, and quartzite rubble.

One of the more unusual groups of effigy mounds built by Wisconsin’s Native Americans during the Late Woodland Period is located in this park. Situated on a low plateau at the headwaters of the North Branch of the Milwaukee River, the group originally contained approximately sixty mounds, dominated by long-tailed effigies that early investigators thought were lizards. Actually they are water spirits or underground water panthers, symbols that were especially common in eastern Wisconsin, with its abundance of lakes, rivers, streams, and wetlands.

The design of this Queen Anne house is probably drawn from the work of George F. Barber, who sold blueprints of his house designs through the mail and marketed them through his catalogs. A design similar to this house appeared in the first issue of Barber’s monthly magazine, American Homes, published in 1895. The same plan appeared later as design 58B in Barber’s catalog New Modern Dwellings and How Best to Design Them, issued around 1896. The two-story clapboard house is asymmetrical, with a steeply pitched hipped roof intersected by gabled dormers.

This imposing twin-spired Romanesque Revival basilica crowns southern Wisconsin’s highest hill (1,351 feet). The Discalced Carmelite Friars maintain this church built over the stone-built Shrine of Mary, which dates from 1879. The rib vaults are carried on arcades of round arches separating the nave from the aisles. In the apse is a mosaic depicting the Court of Heaven and a pink-veined Kasota marble altar. Conrad Schmitt Studios decorated the church interior. Stained glass, by Van Treek Studios of Munich, Germany, was installed in 1958.