Historical Survey |
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In August of 1997 the City of Port Washington (hereafter called the City) hired Timothy F. Heggland, an historic preservation consultant based in Madison, Wisconsin, as its principal investigator and it authorized him to undertake an intensive resource survey of the historically and architecturally significant resources located in a designated project study area that was identical to the existing City of Port Washington corporate boundaries, with the important exception of all the individual buildings within the project area that were already listed in the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP). The boundaries of the resulting project area were set by the City prior to the onset of the project and were also evaluated and given provisional approval by Mr. Joe DeRose of the Division of Historic Preservation (DHP), who toured the project area with the project director. The first phase of the project was a reconnaissance survey of the study area, which was conducted throughout the fall of 1997 and was completed late in January of 1998. The reconnaissance survey ultimately surveyed 445 resources within the project area. These resources included industrial buildings, public buildings, churches, and commercial buildings, but the overwhelming majority were single family dwellings that range in age from the late 1840s to the mid-1960s. All of these buildings were photographed and mapped and a complete inventory of these resources is appended at the end of this report. The reconnaissance survey phase of the project was then followed by the second phase, the intensive survey, which was completed in August of 1998. This phase consisted of an intensive research effort that was designed to generate an overview of the history of the city, an overview of those historic themes that are most closely associated with this history, and basic historic information about a select group of the resources that were identified in the reconnaissance survey. The primary objective of the intensive survey was the identification of all the individual resources and groups of resources within the project area that are of architectural or historical significance and that are potentially eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. A secondary but equally important objective of the survey was the creation of a comprehensive data base of information about Port Washington's historic resources that can be used by the City in making planning decisions for the community. Funding for both the reconnaissance survey and the intensive survey was provided by a grant-in-aid to the City of Port Washington from the U.S. Department of the Interior as administered by the Division of Historic Preservation (DHP) of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (SHSW). Both the reconnaissance survey and the intensive survey phases of the overall project were conducted by Mr. Heggland and were monitored by Mr. Joe DeRose, Historian at the DHP, and Mr. Damon Anderson, representing the City, who acted as the City's Certified Local Government (CLG) Project Manager. Additional oversight was provided by Mr. Jim Draeger, Architectural Historian at the DHP. The boundaries of the project area and the decision to exclude all the buildings already listed on the NRHP from consideration were determined by the City prior to the hiring of a consultant. Consequently, the first step in the reconnaissance survey consisted of a pre-survey during which the consultant undertook a series of drives and walks through the project area. This was done both to familiarize the consultant with the project area and to uncover any unusual aspects of it that might call for special treatment. The first finding of this pre-survey was that the historic retail commercial core of Port Washington is still largely intact and has been little altered by the intrusion of modern buildings, which for the most part are located around the peripheries of this core. The second finding was that almost none of the city's historically important industrial building complexes could be surveyed because they have either been demolished or radically altered by modernization programs and subsequent additions and therefore lack integrity. The third finding, and one of significance for the future of the project, was that while integrity levels vary considerably within the project boundaries there is still a large concentration of intact historic resources within it. Consequently, it was decided to survey all the resources within the project area that were believed to be fifty years old or older and which still retain their original appearance and exterior cladding. Unfortunately, this decision also meant that many of Port Washington's’ older resources would not surveyed due to their lack of integrity. In addition, the scope of the survey was also expanded slightly to include several intact buildings dating from the 1950s and 1960s that are good representative examples of their different styles and which it is believed will be of interest to the City in the near future. While the issue of deciding what to survey was being considered, the process of identifying pertinent historic resource materials was also begun. This involved a search of the resources held by the State Historical Society of Wisconsin (SHSW) in Madison, the W. J. Niederkorn Public Library in Port Washington, the City of Port Washington, Ozaukee County, and the Port Washington Historical Society. As anticipated, the SHSW proved to be an especially fruitful source that produced the majority of the items listed in the bibliography that follows this report. Along with such essential items as, Ozaukee County plat maps and plat books, microfilm copies of Port Washington newspapers, and Sanborn-Perris fire insurance maps of Port Washington, the SHSW’s Visual and Sound Archives also produced historic photos of Port Washington and its Department of Historic Preservation added additional information that is contained in its files. Other essential resources that are located in Port Washington includes the Ozaukee County history published in1881, Village and City of Port Washington Real Estate Tax Assessment Rolls, the sole Port Washington City Directory and three Bird’s Eye views of Port Washington (1865, 1883, and 1893). Another early goal of the survey was to find suitable base maps that could be used to record the locations of the resources surveyed. Ideally, such a map or maps would show building footprints, lot lines, and addresses, although it was not anticipated that such a map would be found. Fortunately, the City of Port Washington was able to provide excellent large scale maps dating from 1996 that show building footprints for the entire city as of that date. This meant that maps that show the required information were already in existence and did not have to be produced for the survey; a significant savings in time and money. Yet another task performed prior to the beginning of the field survey was the identification of all the resources in the project area that had previously been surveyed by the DHP, which uses survey projects such as this one to update information it already has on file and to identify buildings that have been demolished since earlier surveys were undertaken. This involved searching the DHP’s Wisconsin Inventory of Historic Places for inventory cards that matched addresses in the project area, a search that identified 118 buildings and other resource types that had been identified in windshield surveys undertaken in 1975 and 1981, nineteen of which have since been demolished. The ninety-nine surviving buildings and other resources, however, represented only those buildings that the early surveyors felt might be potentially eligible for individual listing in the NRHP using the criteria and knowledge of their times, so these surveys contain only buildings that represent obvious architectural quality. While the new survey reviewed these buildings and resurveyed and rephotographed them as part of the current project, it was also charged with evaluating the architecture of the entire project area, which necessitated analyzing not only examples of the recognized architectural styles but also the large numbers of vernacular form buildings that were left unsurveyed and unanalyzed by the earlier surveys. Specific methodology at this point consists of a judgment being made in the field by the consultant to include a building in the list of inventoried resources because of some aspect of its architectural composition. Following this decision, field notes are made on the building and it is then photographed. Not surprisingly, this level of analysis results in the inventorying of many more resources than a windshield survey. Once the survey criteria had been decided, the field survey itself began, which consisted of identifying all the resources within the project area that met the survey criteria and taking black and white photos of them. The consultant waited until mid-November of 1997 to begin this work so that there would be little or no foliage to obscure the buildings, thereby making it possible to shoot superior photos. The resulting survey recorded 445 resources of all types within the project area, considerably in excess of what was originally anticipated. In addition to checking the 118 Port Washington resources previously identified in the 1975 and 1981 surveys, every building within the project area was also evaluated and 227 additional resources, primarily of architectural interest, were added to the existing inventory. Thus, the majority of the 445 resources surveyed by the consultant were identified as new resources. These resources are listed in the inventory at the end of this report and a smaller group of these resources was researched in greater detail as part of the intensive survey. Following completion of the field work, field notes were checked and organized to facilitate the site-specific research that would take place in the intensive survey phase. Each site was assigned a map code number and this number was then transferred to the base maps of the project area that help both the DHP and the City locate surveyed resources. These maps also assisted the consultant in identifying areas where surveyed resources appear to be concentrated and which, following field review, could be considered candidates for historic district status. This resulted in the identification of four potential residential historic districts where potentially eligible inventoried resources were concentrated and also a fifth district that contains the city's historic commercial core. After further analysis, separate draft maps showing the individual resources within provisional district boundaries were prepared for each of these three historic districts. The reconnaissance survey concluded with a tour of the project area. Mr. Anderson, Mr. Jim Draeger, who is the staff architectural historian of the DHP and the person in charge of the NRHP program in Wisconsin, and the consultant met in Port Washington on April 3, 1998, in order to review the findings of the reconnaissance survey. Twenty-one of the surveyed resources are believed to be individually eligible for listing in the NRHP and the five proposed historic districts were also evaluated at this time and the district boundaries were refined. The results are included in the summary section of this report. With the photographs and the list of resources inventoried by the reconnaissance survey in hand, the consultant began the task of organizing the inventoried resources into groups based on stylistic attributions. Once this task was completed, each of these groups was further evaluated and the best examples in each group became the subject of the more intensive research process that forms the core of the intensive survey. For example, all buildings surveyed that represent the Greek Revival style were grouped together to identify the typical stylistic subtypes and building forms in Port Washington. These were then compared and evaluated to determine which were the best examples within each subtype. The best examples were then evaluated against National Register criteria and those which appeared to meet the criteria were designated as "eligible." The results of this evaluation process can be found in the Architectural Styles section of this report. It needs to be noted, however, that at this stage this designation is advisory only and represents just the best judgment of the consultant. Actual designation of "eligible" status can only be made as a result of a formal evaluation, either through the National Register nomination process or through the Determination of Eligibility process, both of which are evaluated by the staff of the DHP and the Keeper of the National Register in Washington D. C. While this evaluation process was taking place, the reconnaissance survey maps were being compared with the three Bird’s Eye Views of Port Washington (1865, 1883, and 1893), the maps of Port Washington showing building footprints contained within the Washington and Ozaukee Counties Plat Books published in 1892 and 1915, and the several Sanborn-Perris fire insurance maps of Port Washington (1885, 1893, 1898, 1904, 1913,1922, 1938, 1938 (updated to 1955), in order to determine approximate building construction dates for the buildings surveyed. The information thus obtained resulted in a list of approximate (sometimes very approximate) building construction dates for almost every building surveyed, which dates, though necessarily inexact, were still of great value in narrowing the focus of the subsequent intensive research effort that was to follow. The revised building list, complete with approximate construction dates, was then compared with the results of the style evaluation process described above and buildings that ranked high in their respective stylistic categories were included in the intensive research effort. Also included in the intensive research effort were all of the buildings that were included within the provisional historic district boundaries, all buildings considered to be potential eligible individually, and some of those buildings for which an approximated construction date could be narrowed down to within a few years (such as a building that did not show up on the 1898 Sanborn-Perris map but which appears on the 1904 map). The buildings on the resulting list were researched individually to determine dates of construction and the names of original owners. First, all the properties on this list were checked against the current real estate tax assessment lists in the City Treasurer’s office in order to produce a current legal description for every building on the list. These descriptions then became the means of accessing the historic Port Washington Real Estate Tax Rolls, the original copies of which are kept in the Ozaukee County Courthouse, and which date with a few exceptions from 1845 to the present. This research occupied much of the months of March and June of 1998 and ultimately produced building construction dates and original owner's names for all but a handful of the properties on the list that were built after 1847. While tax records research was being conducted a parallel effort was being made to identify and research those historic themes that have been important to the history of Port Washington. The basis of this research is the large group of historic themes that have already been identified by the extensive research that is embodied in the DHP's Cultural Resource Management Plan, which is being undertaken to accomplish the same goals, but on a statewide basis. These themes cover or will eventually cover nearly every aspect of the built history of Wisconsin and it is intended that the research conducted for site-specific projects such as the Port Washington Intensive Survey will be complimentary to this larger ongoing effort. At the community level the purpose of thematic research is to develop an overview of the history of a community that will facilitate the identification of those remaining resources that can be considered historically and possibly architecturally significant from the standpoint of the National Register program and local preservation efforts. Preliminary research undertaken at the onset of the Port Washington Survey suggested that the following themes were important and would prove productive:
The research that followed the identification of these themes relied heavily on secondary sources such as the published history of Port Washington included in the 1881 Washington and Ozaukee Counties history, historic maps of the community, historic Port Washington newspapers, including the several semi-centennial, bicentennial, and sesquicentennial issues, etc. The information thus generated is included in this report and will be found in the historic themes section. Site-specific information will also be found on the intensive survey inventory cards that were prepared for each inventoried resource. Ultimately, the intensive survey researched approximately 116 of the 445 resources that were identified in the reconnaissance survey phase, although all 445 resources were photographed and evaluated in light of NRHP and DHP criteria. Every property surveyed during the course of the project has had an intensive survey card prepared for it in accordance with DHP standards. These cards consist of a dry- mounted photo of the resource on one side and a summary of the historical and architectural analysis performed on the subject resource and other required information such as an address and the photo and map codes assigned to the property on the reverse side. Two copies of each card were made; one for the DHP, and one for the Port Washington Historical Society. In addition, all the written information contained on these cards plus additional historic data was copied into the DHP's electronic data base using the Historibase software developed by the DHP. Finally, much of the historic information collected during the course of the survey and copies of the survey maps were given to the City at the conclusion of the survey. Several of the historic theme chapters in this report that deal with only a few extant resources such as Industry and Education, have been in progress since February of 1998. Most of the other chapters, however, including especially those relating to architectural styles, had to wait until the tax records and newspaper research was completed before they could be written. With the completion of the newspaper research in July of 1998, work on the final chapters of the intensive survey report commenced and was completed by Novemeber of 1998. In addition to the thematic chapters, the building inventory list, and the bibliography, this report also includes copies of the District Survey Forms prepared for the five proposed historic districts. The consultant worked closely with members of the City from the onset of the project and received valuable support and assistance from them throughout the course of the survey. Presentations were made to the City by the consultant and the first public meeting with the larger community took place on January 15, 1998, when a presentation by the consultant and Mr. DeRose of the DHP was made at a regular meeting of the Port Washington Common Council. Another meeting is scheduled for later in the fall of 1998, when a final report on the survey will be made to the community by the consultant and members of the DHP staff. |
