| Additional Information: | IONIC COLUMNS ON PORCH MODILLIONS UNDER EAVES S TONE LINTELS Map code originally CT #/#; the CT presumably meant city and was stripped off.
"The house at 1200 College Avenue is associated with St. Catherine's High School, which traces its beginnings to the fall of 1864 when Dominican Sisters established an all-girls academy. There were both days students (i.e. those who lived at home) and boarding students. The mother house was located at 1200 Park Avenue.
This house on College Avenue was built in 1891 by the sisters, who wrote that, "in the summer of 1891, a handsome brick parsonage was erected upon the convent grounds for the resident chaplain. The cost of the same is about $5613.18." Teaching priests lived in the house until 1987, after which the teaching sisters have resided there.
The blueprints for the house at 1200 College were found in 1960, when the mother house was torn down. They are now preserved in the Siena Center. Unfortunately, neither the architect, nor the builder in mentioned on the plans, nor did a search of city records reveal that information. Therefore much of what we know is from oral history. We are indebted to Sister Shirley Kubat, Archivist, and Sister Carol Wester for providing information for this article.
The cream brick bungalow style house sits at the corner of the high school athletic field, just a short block from the school. The house is in the Italianate style, with limited ornamentation in contrast to the highly ornamented Queen Anne style houses in the area. The blueprint show three dormers, all in the front. According to the sisters, a dormer was added on the north side and another in the rear at a later date. The interior of the house is dorm style, with bedrooms in a row, a large living room, but no kitchen. Residents of the house were expected to to eat at the dining room in the mother house. There are high ceilings and tall doorways which included transoms for the bedrooms. There is some lovely carving on the corning blocks of the doorways, identical in each doorway. The carvings could be symbolic, each showing two three-petal flowers and a fern-like center possibly symbolizing the palm branches of Good Friday. The front porch features three Ionic style columns, and the eaves have Greek style corbels supporting them. The house received some recognition at the diocese level in 1891 when it was blessed by the bishop of Milwaukee at its opening, and then one hundred years later, in 1991, it was blessed again by the then bishop of Milwaukee." --Jerry and Nancy Ritter "Preservation Racine News" Summer 2018, Volume 12 |
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