Pierce, Carrie, House

About this property

The Carrie Pierce House is an elegant house built about 1857 in Madison, Wisconsin, for Alexander McDonnell, one of the builders of the third Wisconsin State Capitol. In 1972 the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places and, in 1985, converted to the Mansion Hill Inn. Alexander McDonnell was a building contractor in early Madison. In 1857, less than ten years after Wisconsin became a state, McDonnell's firm began work building the east wing of the third Wisconsin State Capitol. That same year McDonnell bought a wooded lot on a hill a quarter mile northwest of the capitol and hired the firm of August Kutzbock and Samuel Hunter Donnell (the two were also architects of the Capitol building) to design for him "the best house money could buy." Kutzbock and Donnell designed the house with the exterior much as it looks today. It stands two stories, clad in Prairie du Chien sandstone, the same stone used for the third Capitol. (McDonnell built the railroad to bring the stone to Madison.) The exterior stonework on this house resembles that of the third Capitol, and some of the decoration inside the house is likewise said to resemble Kutzbock and Donnell's designs for the Capitol, so perhaps this house preserves some glimpses of that building, destroyed by fire in 1904. The house was completed in 1858. Following Francie and Alexander McDonnell, who had a home office here off the northern side door to East Gilman Street, the house was occupied by Roberta and John H. Garnhart, owner of the Garnhart Reaper Works. After the death of J. H. Garnhart, his widow married Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Orsamus Cole, and they resided in the house. The next occupant was Sarah Fairchild Dean Conover, the sister of Civil War hero and Wisconsin Governor Lucius Fairchild and herself Madison's leading lady in social circles. From 1906 to 1938, Carrie and George Pierce, a power company executive, lived here and ran a high-class boarding house in the mansion. The house was renovated and converted into an apartment building sometime after the Pierce family owned it, enclosing many of the historic features inside the walls and behind newer elements in order to preserve them for future use. In 1971, the house was designated a landmark by the Madison Landmarks Commission. In 1972 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places, because it is "one of the very best" and the most unique architecturally of the remaining historic houses built in Madison in the decade following statehood. In 1985 the Alexander Company remodeled the house into a luxury hotel, and in 2008 Trek Bicycle and Hospitality bought the hotel and carried out further renovations of the interior.

Location

Categories

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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