National Register of Historic Places
Richards Hill Residential Historic District
Watertown, Jefferson County, Wisconsin
The record
- Listed
- June 14, 2013
- Type
- Historic district
- Address
- Roughly bounded by Western, Richards, Thomas & Harvey Aves., Livsey Pl. & Charles St., Watertown
- County
- Jefferson
- State
- Wisconsin
- Contributing resources
- 49 buildings
- Coordinates
- 43.18756, -88.70955
- Reference number
- 13000403
Slide toward Today to fade the historical sheet and see the modern map underneath.
The outline is the area recorded for this listing in National Park Service map data, drawn approximately.
David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesUSGS Historical Topographic Map CollectionUSGS Historical Topographic Map CollectionBarry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection, Stanford LibrariesAmerican Geographical Society Library, UW-Milwaukee
The story
Written by AI from this property's National Register nomination and the record above; every sentence is checked against its sources before it appears here. Corrections: privacy@treealive.com
Richards Hill Residential Historic District is a residential historic district in Watertown, Jefferson County. It covers 20.37 acres and includes 49 contributing buildings in styles including Queen Anne, Gothic Revival, Bungalow and Tudor Revival, and it was listed in the National Register in 2013.
Why it's listed
It was listed under criterion C, with local-level significance in architecture and a period of significance of circa 1854 to 1950, reflecting construction that began around 1854.
Physical character
Walls are brick, wood clapboard or shingle, stucco and stone on brick foundations, under roofs of asphalt or slate. Roof and detail work includes steeply pitched cross gables, hipped roofs with flared eaves, stepped tile-capped parapets, half-timbering, basketweave patterned brick blind arch transoms and an octagonal tower.
Historical context
Watertown was first settled in 1836, incorporated as a city in 1853, and linked by rail in 1855 and 1860. John Richards sold a strip of his Western Avenue property in 1870, and by 1910 the Richards family had platted and sold its remaining land as small residential lots, with the neighborhood filling in through the 1920s and growth reaching Thomas Avenue and Charles Street in the 1930s. In 1938 the octagonal Richards House was given to the Watertown Historical Society and opened as a local history museum, and in 1957 the schoolhouse of the first kindergarten in the United States, built in 1865, was relocated to its grounds.