Badger State Shoe Company

About this property

The Badger State Shoe Company is a classically-styled 6-story shoe factory built in 1910 in Madison, Wisconsin, a half mile north-east of the Capitol. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on April 11, 1989. Madison was founded to be Wisconsin's capital and from the start was more white collar than most other cities in the area, which grew as mill towns. By the end of the Civil War, Madison's only manufacturing enterprises were a few mills and an iron foundry. Some community leaders felt that the city needed to diversify by attracting large industries. On the other hand, some government and university workers didn't want their beautiful city between the lakes "soiled by industrial pollution." Growth was slow through the economic slump of the late 1800s, but a few manufacturers like Carmin & Billings Plow Works and Northern Electric Manufacturing did take hold. After 1900, industrial growth increased. Badger State Shoe Company was one of the manufacturing businesses starting in Madison at that time. Shoemaking had evolved in the 19th century from small local shoemaking shops to bigger factories that used machines and unskilled workers for mass-production. Some of the cities along Lake Michigan had big leather tanneries, and the supply of leather and transportation connections fueled the growth of shoe production there. Badger Shoe had incorporated in Milwaukee in 1893, after reorganizing from an earlier shoe company. The directors were Albert and Henry L. Atkins. In 1900 they relocated their factory from St. Paul Avenue in Milwaukee to what is now 1335 Gilson Street in South Madison, possibly to lower their operating costs. After a few years of difficult hiring at that location, they opened another factory on Wilson Street. In 1909 they announced plans to consolidate their operations into a new building. The location chosen on Blount Street was in a low-lying section of the isthmus which had been called the "Great Central Marsh." Filling and development of the area began in the 1890s, with many streets there built up with cinder-fill, and mixing industry with residential use. The rail lines ran by a few blocks to the south, providing good transportation. Badger Shoe hired Ferdinand Kronenberg to design their new factory. Kronenberg was born in Germany around 1877 and apprenticed in Madison. He had designed homes around Madison and the Cardinal Hotel in 1908. For the new shoe factory he designed a six-story block clad in Chicago brick. The decoration was simple, but refined for a factory. Bands of windows are uniformly spaced except for the corners where an expanse of solid brick the full height of the building suggests four solid corner columns. Lines of brick corbel below the third-floor windows and the sixth-floor windows also suggest a stable base and a lighter top. The building is topped with a denticulated iron cornice, again drawing from classical architecture.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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