Category:Robert M. Bashford House

Robert M. Bashford House 

historic house in Wisconsin, United States
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Instance of	house
Location	Madison, Madison metropolitan area, Wisconsin
Architectural style	Italianate architecture
Architect	August Kutzbock
Occupant	Edward Salomon Robert McKee Bashford
Heritage designation	National Register of Historic Places listed place (B, C, NRHP building, Bashford, Robert M., House, 1973–)
43° 04′ 44″ N, 89° 23′ 13″ W
Authority file  Q7347089 NRHP reference number: 73000075 Reasonator Scholia Wikidocumentaries PetScan statistics WikiMap Locator tool KML file WikiShootMe OpenStreetMap Search depicted

Built in 1858, this Italian Villa-variant Italianate-style house was designed by Napoleon Bonaparte Van Slyke and August Kutzbock. It was originally owned and lived in by H. K. Lawrence, a banker. The house was sold to Wisconsin Governor Edward Salomon in the early 1860s. The house was then acquired by Morris E. Fuller, an agricultural implement dealer, and his wife, Anna Fuller in 1865, and they lived there until 1889. In 1889, Sarah Fuller, their daughter, married Robert McKee Bashford, a lawyer who ran a newspaper and later became the mayor of Madison, a Wisconsin state senator, and a Wisconsin Supreme Court justice. He lived at the house until his death in 1911. Between 1916 and 1928, the house was the home of Dr. Corydon Dwight and Bessie Dwight, who helped establish the Vilas Park Zoo. In the 1930s, the mansion became a boarding house, and it is presently utilized as an apartment building.

The house features sandstone block exterior walls with a front and side gable roof, eaves with dentils, a square tower with a low-slope pyramidal hipped roof, four-over-four double-hung windows, arched attic windows, decorative window trim, a front door with an arched transom, a front porch with square columns and a low-slope roof, a shorter rear ell with a gabled roof, and floor-height windows on the first floor. The house once featured many small balconies with brackets and railings on the second and third floors of the tower, and on the front gable, which have been removed, as well as a shallower but more ornate porch at the same location as the present porch.

The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 and is a contributing structure in the Mansion Hill Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1997.