About The Project

For the City of Madison sesquicentennial, my friend Gerhardt remarked that he wanted to create a listing of village era houses - a list of all the extant houses constructed before 1856.  "That sounds like a lot of work," I thought. But, it would be cool...at least in my mind.  Jay Rath, in Isthmus, published a partial list around this time of some of the most notable entries.


So I've decided I'm going to try to blog them one by one.  We'll see how far I can get.


But 1856 is kind of an awkward cutoff year.  Let's do 1861 instead.  Antebellum has a better ring to it.  In actuality, nothing much was built in the year 1858-1861 anyway. So here it is:  I'm going to try to list every surviving structure currently within the City of Madison that was built in or before the start of the American Civil War.  Some of these structures are well known, and have lasted because they are magnificent buildings, exhibiting unique architectural styles.  Some of these structures are very cheap, small homes that were built in haste; their builders never intending them to last so long.


A very small number of these are commercial or institutional buildings.  Some of them are early homes that have survived in their original locations.  Others are homes that were moved out of the path of the wrecking ball at some time in their past.  Yet another category are farm houses that were annexed into the city.  All have had a certain measure of luck in being able to dodge destruction for all these decades in a city that has seen such vigorous growth in the last 150 years.


One of the primary guides for this exercise is the Wisconsin Architecture and History Inventory, which is impossible to use to link to specific records.