The 14 small one-story-tall Cape Cod style single-family houses in the Mansion Street district comprise the largest part of the Thrifty Homes Addition to the City of De Pere, which was platted in April of 1941. Those responsible for creating the new plat were Anton and Mary Van Gruensven, the owners of the land, and their son-in-law, Edward Vercauteren, the manager of the De Pere yard of the Standard Lumber Yards, Inc., who took advantage of new Federal financing and rules regarding the allocation of building materials to build a small neighborhood of privately funded housing that was intentionally created to provide housing for families engaged in defense work in Green Bay area industries.

The district’s first two houses were built in 1941 by Ralph P. Belanger, a local contractor, but the rest were built in 1941 and 1942 by Vercauteren’s Standard Lumber Yards, which subcontracted the construction work to local contractors that the firm did business with. The resulting district is the only new suburb that was built in De Pere during WWII and it contains the only buildings in that city that were built specifically to house defense industry workers and to aid the war effort. Fortunately, this district is still very intact today, and it continues to be a vital part of the larger residential neighborhood that surrounds it.