As a pandemic safer-at-home project, I decided to research the history of our house. It's amazing what's available on the web. I went down quite a rabbit hole and now have an eleven-page history of the house. Don't worry, I'll try to summarize it as briefly as I can here.
My partner then, now husband, Rob Latousek, and I bought the house in 1986. So we have owned the house for 34 years and counting. Before my research, I knew two sisters had lived here for a long time and suspected they had us beat in longevity. Here's what I found out.
Our house is the middle of three on this narrow side of a nearly triangular city block
between Sherman and Gorham. All three, 403, 407, and 411 N. Brearly, are closely related because our three lots were once one lot that was purchased by Joseph Schubert, a noted local photographer, in 1873. He and his wife Johanna built 403 soon after that. This is not what either the TLNA Neighborhood Walking Tour, nor the National Register nomination for the surrounding historic district claims.
Rather, both state that Robert Hastie built the house at 403 in 1854. But I lucked upon an 1869 newspaper article describing the fire that completely destroyed the Hasties' house. Joseph Schubert's grandson, in a 1948 article, also claimed that his grandfather built 403. So, I believe the house next door at 403 is not the house the Hasties built. |
407 N. Brearly on the left, 403 in the center in March 1955. Note the huge elm in the terrace in front
of 407 and the "on ramp" in the foreground from Brearly onto Gorham. Wisconsin Historical Society.
Joseph and Johanna's son, Joseph C. Schubert, had grown up at 403. The younger Schubert was a three-term mayor of Madison from 1906 to 1912. He built several investment houses in the neighborhood, including 411 N. Brearly (1896) on the same lot as his parent's house. He built his own fine Craftsman style house on the lake at 1118 Sherman in 1905. His mother died in 1907 and his father had just recently passed away when, in 1913, he divided up his parents' lot into three small lots, creating one for a new house in between 403 and 411. He built a simple house, also in the Craftsman style, at 407.
He sold this new house in 1915 to Helena Swensen. Helena was a widow; her husband Thorvald had died in 1907. They had five children: Christian, William, Luth, Louise, and Mena (in that order.) Three of Helena's offspring moved with her to 407 in 1915. Helena was 75 at the time, Christian was 48, Louise was 39, and Mena was 37. Christian was a carpenter, Louise a store clerk and Mena a bookkeeper. Brothers William and Luth lived with their wives and children in their own homes on the east side. William was a well-known east-side developer. He would later name a street for his mother: Helena Street still exists near Atwood Avenue. Luth would later become president of an oil company.
The Swensens lived uneventfully at 407 until 1928. For the two sisters, Louise and Mena, this was the start of a rough five years. Their mother would die in 1928; two brothers, Luth and Christian, in 1929; and the remaining brother, William, in 1932. All of this happened along with the start of the Great Depression. Still, just months after Christian's death in 1929 (and soon after the stock market crash of that year) Louise managed to buy a doughnut shop on Atwood Avenue. Perhaps because of the
expense of this new venture and the other sad turn of events, Louise and Mena decided to rent out 407 N. Brearly and move to smaller quarters.
For the entire Depression, the sisters lived in various places around town, including in the apartment above the doughnut shop for a while. (The doughnut shop was at 2118 Atwood, where Talbot's Gallery is today.) In the meantime, 407 was rented at various times to students, clergy, a dentist, and others including some of the sisters' own extended family.
After a ten-year absence, in 1941, the sisters returned to 407, but still took in boarders. With the housing shortage after WWII, the house was especially full. Both had always been very involved with the Bethel Guild, which supported the Bethel Lutheran Church, and they continued to host gatherings. Mena was in great demand for her dramatic and humorous readings. Her readings in Norwegian dialect "kept her audience in stitches," according to one newspaper columnist.
On February 19, 1952, Louise hosted a church circle at Bethel. Three days later she died at home at 75. Mena lived two more years, dying in 1954. The Capital Times wrote a kind memorial of her life in their "All Around the Town" column. She had worked for 25 years at B.B. Clarke publishing (an east side park still bears her employer's name) and 20 years for the state Office of Motor Vehicles. She had two interests in life, the column said, "her work and her church." Her will left her estate to four nieces and a nephew, all her late brother Luth's children.
Richard and Jane Clarke bought the house from Mena's estate the year she died. He worked at Oscar Meyer and she for the Small Business Administration. They had five teenage children, a fact at first shocking to me, having lived at 407 all these years with just the two of us. Then I remembered my childhood home, no bigger than 407, where my parents raised six. But the Clarke kids would soon be leaving home for marriage and the Marine Corp.
The Clarkes' trip to California to visit a son and his family made the paper in 1964. While there they had dinner at the home of movie star Charlton Heston and his wife. Richard Clarke and Mrs. Heston were first cousins.
In 1965, after a brief illness, Richard's wife Jane died at 47 years old. All the kids were married and out of the house by this time. Richard retired from Oscar Meyer
that year. A little more than a year later in May 1966, Richard remarried at Christ Presbyterian Church, across the street from 407. His new wife was his daughter's mother-in-law, also widowed. They held an open house after the wedding at 407.
The couple lived there till 1971. Richard Clarke had owned 407 for 17 years at that point.
After the Clarkes, 407 was purchased by a string of five relatively short-time owners, the shortest being 8 months by an investment broker who made $4000 on his short-term investment and probably never lived there. The longest was six years by a U.W. professor who bought it for his son to use, with roommates, while attending college. It was a buyers' market then, and it took him a while to sell it. But it was from the professor that Rob and I bought 407 N. Brearly in 1986.
So, did the Swensen sisters live here longer than our 34 years? Both moved in in 1915, but Mena lived two years longer than Louise, passing in 1954. She would have us beat at 39 years ... except for the 10 years during the Depression they rented the house out. We win. |
