Court Street Commercial Historic District

About this property

The Court Street Commercial Historic District is a largely intact part of the old downtown of Richland Center, Wisconsin. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 - a 11.2 acres (4.5 ha) historic district which included 51 contributing buildings and 20 non-contributing ones. The buildings are commercial, mostly in Late Victorian styles constructed from 1870 to 1938. Most are brick two-story buildings; a few one-story and three-story brick buildings are interspersed. In 1850 Vermont-born Ira S. Haseltine bought 160 acres along the Pine River and platted a town of Richland Center. A year or two later he got it chosen as the county seat. By 1854 Haseltine had built a dam on the river which powered a sawmill and gristmill, and around this industry a little commercial center had taken shape, with a hotel, a post office, three stores, a blacksmith, and eight homes. By 1858 a newspaper was added, "a hardware store, a wagon shop, a cobbler, and brick yard, a baker, a jewelry store, a cabinet shop, and several tanneries and asheries." Most of this development was near the river, to the west of the current historic district. The town grew slowly until the mid-1870s due to lack of good transportation. In 1856 the Milwaukee and Mississippi Railroad had built its line along the Wisconsin River valley to the south, bypassing Richland Center, and refused to build a spur up to the town. In the early 1870s the town finally built its own spur 16 miles down the Pine River valley to Lone Rock - 16 miles of wooden narrow-gauge track. With that connection to the outside world completed in 1876, the town began growing faster, with the downtown expanding east into what is now the historic district. The surrounding farms transitioned from growing wheat to dairy, with Richland Center providing supplies, services and connection to markets for the surrounding countryside. Butter production moved from the farms into town in the 1880s. Banks opened in 1870, 1881 and 1891. Wholesalers in town traded in cheese, groceries, fruits, tobacco, lumber, produce, livestock, poultry, eggs, wool and feed. The city was chartered in 1887, soon providing lighting, fire protection, and public water. Many of the buildings still standing along Court Street were built in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Many of their storefronts at street level have been remodeled, but the upper stories are largely as originally built, with brick detail and elaborate cornices intact. Following are some examples, roughly in the order built. The Park Hotel at 213 S. Central Ave was built of wood in 1873, then veneered with brick in 1900, then expanded in 1926 and 1930. It is three stories, with a square tower on the north end and an octagonal tower on the south. The round arches suggest Romanesque Revival style; the mansard roof on the one tower is from Second Empire style. Now apartments.

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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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