1150 Spaight St
Madison, WI, USA

Bascom B. Clarke House

The Bascom B. Clarke House in Madison, Wisconsin was built in 1899, designed in Queen Anne style with Gothic Revival details for Clarke, who founded the magazine American Thresherman. In 1980 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.


History

Bascom B. Clarke was born in Virginia in 1851. In 1857, his family headed west, where his father founded the town of Mount Adams on the White River in Arkansas. After the Civil War Bascom lived in Colfax, Indiana. With only a few weeks of formal education in his whole life, he became postmaster and published a newspaper. In 1873 he married M. Belle Watkins. Their beginnings were humble - Bascom later said that their first home in Indiana was "furnished with a borrowed table and a borrowed bedstead" - but he made a small fortune selling threshing machines.

In 1890 Clarke moved to Madison, continuing in the threshing machine business. There he helped organize the Dane County Telephone Company with Robert La Follette and others. In 1898 he began publishing American Thresherman, the only magazine at that time to focus on the mechanization of farming. Bascom regularly contributed a column called "Uncle Silas" in which he shared his own musings, like "Most of the skyscrapers in the cities have farmer boys as tenants."

In 1899 Clarke had the architectural firm Claude & Starck of Madison design this house. The firm had just formed the year before and would go on to design many Prairie Style libraries around the state, but this early design is residential and traditional. The house stands 2.5 stories, built of wood. The complex roof, asymmetric gables and bays fall within the Queen Anne architectural style that was popular at the time. Yet the pointed-arch church-like windows in the dormer ends draw from Gothic Revival style and some of the woodwork on the porch draws from Stick style. Inside was dark woodwork, a brick fireplace, and bookcases with Prairie Style leaded-glass doors. The house cost $4,500 to build.

Bascom was also instrumental in establishing a Masonic temple in Madison. He died in 1929. In 1980 his house was added to the NRHP as an early design of Claude and Starck and as home of one of Madison's leading citizens. The house is now located within the Orton Park Historic District.

National Register of Historic Places - Bascom B. Clarke House

Statement of Significance:

An early work of Madison architects Claude and Starck, this house was for thirty years the residence of Bascom B. Clarke, one of Madison's leading citizens. A dabbler in a wide variety of -ventures, Clarke made his enduring mark in agriculture and communications, particularly journalism.

Born in Virginia in 1851, Bascom Clarke was made a refugee by the Civil War until he was literally adopted "by the 2nd Indiana Artillery battery; the first in a lifetime of instances in which Clarke was able to constantly impress people,3 After the war, Clarke moved to Indiana and before he was twenty years old became the publisher of a local newspaper. During the next several years, he invested in and promoted the ^ production and sale of threshing machines and made a sizeable fortune in the process. In 1890, Clarke moved to Madison, Wisconsin to extend his interests to the farm areas of the state. In Madison, he also continued his interest in communications. In 1895, he, together with Robert M. LaFollette and others, organized the Dane County Telephone Company, which extended service to many rural areas for the first time. Three years later, Clarke began the American Thresherman, a magazine devoted primarily to farming, but that gained a large readership from the non-farming population as well. This was due to Clarke's own wit and his wide-ranging column; the aphorisms of "Uncle Silas" were the magazine's most popular feature. A notable authority on agriculture, Clarke gave most of the space in his magazine over to the development and use of farm machinery. The Thresherman was at the time the only agricultural journal to give its primary attention to the increasing mechanization of farm operations, and this played an important role in the modernization of the farm industry. Readers were advised, for example, on the best types of machines for tasks, on the ways to select the right machine for the right job, and so on. This naturally enabled Clarke to have influence over the manufacturing interests (of which he was a member with his threshing machine investments) as well as the rural community. The Thresherman was purely Clarke's own; after his death in 1929, his family chose to discontinue it.

Clarke once referred to his first residence in Indiana as "furnished with a borrowed table and borrowed bedstead."8 The like could hardly be said of the residence he died in. Constructed in 1899, the B. B, Clarke House cost $4,500. 9 Clarke employed the firm of Claude & Starck to produce the design. Versatile designers who were accomplished in the Prairie School mode, architects Louis Ward Claude and Edward F. Starck practiced together from 1898 until 1929. One of the firm's earliest works, the B. B. Clarke House is a transitional design conceived as a Gothicized version of the then-current Queen Anne Style, with elements indicating the future course of the firm. Publication of a photograph of the house in the Inland Architect and News Record in 1901 indicates that the imposing house was also considered to be noteworthy in its day.