Pleasant Hill Residential Historic District

About this property

The Pleasant Hill Residential Historic District is a largely intact old neighborhood a few blocks east of Marshfield's downtown. Most of the contributing properties in the district were built between 1880 and 1949, including large, stylish homes built by businessmen and professionals, and smaller vernacular homes built by laborers. The district was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000 for its concentration of intact historical architecture. Marshfield began in 1872 when the Wisconsin Central Railroad built its main line just a hundred yards north of the forest that would become the Pleasant Hill neighborhood. Hotels and saloons opened for the railroad workers and lumberjacks, then hardware stores and harness shops. A sawmill opened, a furniture factory, a feed mill, and a stave and heading factory. Doctors and lawyers set up practices. The rough little community among the stumps grew rapidly, with a population of 2,090 by 1885. But don't picture the orderly Central Avenue of today; instead picture horses pulling clanking wagons past drunken lumberjacks stumbling to the next saloon, churning the unpaved Central Avenue into mud, dust, or slush. The earliest large, stylish houses in Marshfield were built starting in 1880 by the officers of the Upham Company, west of Central near their sawmill in what is now the Upham House Historic District. Not long after, other businessmen and professionals began building large, stylish houses a few blocks east of Central on what was probably already called Pleasant Hill. It wasn't much of a hill, but it was higher than Central Avenue, and it must have seemed pleasant compared to the dirt and noise on Central. The house at 107 S. Cherry Avenue is a simple 2-story front-gabled house. Built in 1880 and added to in 1885, it is probably the oldest remaining house in the district, built near the rail line that was laid only eight years before. The William Noll, Jr. house at 117 South Cherry is a large Queen Anne-style house built in 1891, 2.5 stories with hip and gable roof, an eyebrow window, bay windows, a wrap-around porch, and fish scale shingles on the upper stories. William Jr. was a son of William Noll Sr. who founded Noll Hardware, and was involved in the family's store a few blocks away on Central Ave. The Eli Winch house (at left in top photo) at 201 S. Vine Ave. is a classic Queen Anne style house, built in 1897 by Hans Billie, an important builder in Marshfield at the time. Characteristic features of Queen Anne are the asymmetry and complex roof. Also characteristic of Queen Anne are the bay windows, the wraparound porch, and the varied surface textures and colors with the clapboard alternating with bands of shingles. Winch owned the Marshfield Stave Factory just across the railroad tracks on Cherry and was a state legislator.

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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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