3119 West Wells Street
Milwaukee, WI, USA

Abraham H. Esbenshade House

The Abraham H. Esbenshade House is a late Queen Anne-style house built in 1899 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.


History

Abraham Esbenshade was secretary-treasurer of the F. Westphal Co., a manufacturer of files. He and his wife Alice had the Milwaukee architects Crane & Barkhausen design this new home for them and it was built in 1899.

The house is two stories with a hip roof, and a generally squarish footprint. Its asymmetry, its corner turret, and its variety of textures (brick, limestone and stucco) are typical of Queen Anne style, but other details are unlike any standard Queen Anne design. The parapeted gable rising in the center front is a Flemish Renaissance feature. The flat bell-shaped roof on the turret is unusual - perhaps eastern European. The scroll-sawed bargeboards could be a throw-back to Gothic Revival style. The decoration in some gable ends match the Flemish gable more than the fish-scale shingles typical of Queen Anne.

It is located at 3119 West Wells Street, in the historic Concordia district of Milwaukee.

National Register of Historic Places - Abraham H. Esbenshade House

Statement of Significance:

The Abraham H. Esbenshade House is locally significant as an example of late Queen Anne residential architecture that illustrates the transition to the more restrained domestic architecture of the early twentieth century. Built in 1899 for Esbenshade, it is one of the best-preserved late Queen Anne residences in the city. Designed by the architecture firm of Charles D. Crane and Carl C. Barkhausen, it is representative of the best of the large-scale residential commissions the firm executed at the end of the nineteenth century. The incorporation of Renaissance Revival elements such as Flemish gables was typical of their work at this period for their largely German-American clientele.

In addition to residences, the firm also executed churches, commercial buildings & institutions.
In the context of late Queen Anne domestic architecutre in Milwaukee, the Esbenshade House is one of the most unique. There simply is not anything else like it. The house represents the inventive experimentation that occurred as Victorianera architects attempted to make the transition from the Queen Anne picturesque aesthetic to the historical revivalism of the early 20th Century. (See historical Background for more information on architects.