Neillsville Downtown Historic District

About this property

Neillsville Downtown Historic District is a section of the historic old downtown of Neillsville, Wisconsin, with buildings as old as 1872. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. The settlement of Neillsville began when James O'Neill and his companions cut a road up through the forest from Black River Falls in June 1845. They built a sawmill on the bank of O'Neill Creek and began cutting pine and floating it downstream to their mill. The loggers prospered, more settlers came, and by 1860 the population approached 250. Businesses developed along Main Street, which is now called Hewett Street. The earliest were wood frame buildings. The first brick structure in town (and in Clark County) was built in 1872, and is in the district - the Hewett and Woods General Store at 502 Hewett Street - the blue building on the left in the photo. Its brick is probably the "soft brick" produced locally by King and Vine. Though it is early and simple, its style shows some Italianate influence. This first brick building was called "the Brick Store" for years. The Lowe Brothers building at 508 Hewett is a graceful brick building with Romanesque arches and a cast iron cornice, built in 1896. Starting in 1927 the building housed a Red Owl grocery store. The Bast Bakery at 510 Hewett is another brick Italianate building with cornice, built around 1890, which originally housed a meat and flour store. The August Snyder Clothing Store at 518 Hewett is another brick Italianate building with cornice, this one built in 1900. It has a second-story bay window which projects above the sidewalk. The Clark County Bank building at 522 Hewett was built in 1887, then expanded and elaborated to Queen Anne style with a clipped gable, iron cornice, and brick corbels. The Sniteman Drug store at 528 Hewett is a striking brick Italianate building with metal cornice - the tallest on the block. Charles C. Sniteman was a New Yorker who trained at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. He came to Neillsville in 1879 to manage the Henry Meyer Drug Store and bought it in 1891. In 1895 he added the second story to a previous building and redid the front, producing the building we see today. Sniteman invented a fly spray used by farmers and a "blue ointment used in lumber camps to repel lice." The Commercial State Bank at 534 Hewett was built of red brick in 1887 and housed a dry goods and grocery store. In 1917 the Commercial State Bank remodeled the facade into a more dignified Classical Revival style, with a central opening framed in limestone blocks. The opening originally contained multipaned windows and decorative panels; today the upper part has been filled with wood.

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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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