University Hill Farms Historic District

About this property

The University Hill Farms Historic District is part of a subdivision on the west side of Madison, Wisconsin, built on land which was once an experimental farm of the University of Wisconsin. Starting in the 1950s the UW subdivided most of its 600-acre farm into residential lots and worked with the city of Madison to provide city services and develop a planned suburb. In 2015 the district was added to the National Register of Historic Places. In 1836 Josiah A. Noonan bought the 156-acre piece of land that would become the core of University Hill Farms, around the time he was helping with the original plat of Madison. Around 1845 Noonan's sister Clarissa and her husband Harmon J. Hill began to run Noonan's farm, and in 1849 they bought it. The Hills were apparently successful farmers, building a "very fine Italianate style Gabled Ell farmhouse" in 1857. They ran the farm for almost fifty years, retiring in 1893. The University of Wisconsin was founded in 1848, with its early curriculum focused on geography, English grammar, Latin and Greek. But interest grew in more practical subjects, and with the Morrill Act of 1862, the UW began offering instruction in agriculture. In 1866 a department of agriculture was established and the university bought a 196-acre farm west of campus. In 1897, with campus growth eating away at the old farm, and with the emergence of mechanized agriculture, the UW needed a larger experimental farm, so bought the Hill farm further west. In following years, the UW bought adjacent farms until in 1947 the University's experimental "Hill Farms" totalled 613 acres. By the 1950s, Madison had grown itself into a housing shortage. Residential subdivisions had grown around all sides of the UW's experimental farm, leaving it no space to expand, and the farm's land had become valuable. The Board of Regents decided to sell the farm to be subdivided into lots, and use the profits to create a much larger experimental farm outside the city. The initial thought was to simply sell the whole parcel to a developer, but the Madison Board of Realtors advised that the UW could raise more money by developing the land itself. Working with the UW, the city of Madison annexed the new land and had its planning engineer Walter Johnson draw up a preliminary plan for the new subdivision, with curvilinear streets, many cul-de-sacs, and areas reserved for parks, schools, and churches. The surrounding subdivisions lacked any commercial properties other than the seven-store Shorewood Shopping Center, so Johnson added retail areas in the new subdivision. Along with the parks, this should make the area a complete community, sparing residents from frequent drives to other parts of the city. The retail areas were ringed with apartments and parks as a buffer for the single-family residential areas. Johnson followed leading urban planning ideas of the day which had been used in places like Radburn, New Jersey. The city agreed to buy 85 acres of the subdivision for schools and parks. In 1955 the regents hired Chicago-based but nationally-known land planner Carl L. Gardner & Associates to create a master plan. Working with Professor Richard Ratcliff of the UW's Commerce School, Gardner kept many aspects of Johnson's plan, but replaced the cul-de-sacs with long blocks, allowed for more residential lots, and added space for a school and an area for state office buildings.

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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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