Buildings of Wisconsin

I have been buying the volumes of Buildings of the United States since they started coming out in the early 1990s. You get a discount if you are a member of the Society of Architectural Historians. I am excited about all of the volumes but especially about states where I have lived or have some other connection. The earlier volumes were published by Oxford University Press (the bluish ones in the picture) and the later volumes by University of Virginia Press (the black ones). I do prefer the OUP format. Buildings of Wisconsin was published in 2016 but I didn't get it then because UVa Press was shifting distributors and things went askew. The Wisconsin volume finally came today so I checked to see if New Auburn was in the index. We lived there in the early 1950s and we Clarke kids were pretty excited when Michael Perry started publishing books about New Auburn like Population: 485 and about small town life and Wisconsin. I was sorry to read in Population: 485 that the old school where I went to first to third grades had been torn down. No kindergarten then and all twelve grades were in the same building, first and second grades in one classroom with Mrs Kelly, third to fifth in another classroom with Mrs McCarthy, and the big kids upstairs.

So I opened the Wisconsin volume and checked the index. No entry for New Auburn which is up North, near Eau Claire and Rice Lake. I was jumping around the index a bit and noticed Milton, a small town down near Madison. My dad was a pastor in the Seventh Day Baptist church in New Auburn and there was another SDB church in Milton as well as a college founded by SDBs in 1844 but which closed in 1982. The entry for Milton was about the Milton House.

It was built in 1845 by Joseph Goodrich, one of the founders of Milton College. The building was constructed of grout concrete (the first in the U.S.) and one end is hexagonal. Orson Squire Fowler, of octagon house fame, recommended the use of grout for polygonal buildings. According to the Wikipedia article (citing the landmark nomination), it is "the most prominent abolitionist site still standing in Wisconsin." The entry for the Milton House in the Wisconsin BUS volume mentions that Joseph Goodrich was "a native of New York State who founded and developed Milton [and] brought this construction material to the area." I figured he had to be a Seventh Day Baptist. I checked for his obituary on They came to Milton on RootsWeb. Yes, indeed, he was SDB. He was born in Hancock, Massachusetts, and lived in Stephentown, N.Y. (where my older sister used to live) and then Alfred, N.Y. (where I now live in the family house built in 1874 by my great-grandfather) before heading out to Milton. SDBs are a small group of Sabbatarian (observing Saturday) Baptists. Especially in the early days, they stuck together, even as they migrated West. Stores in some small SDB-dominated towns like Alfred closed on Sabbath (Saturday) and opened on Sunday. Even the post office in Alfred observed Sabbath until the 1960s or thereabouts.