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Property Features
Norbertine monks, who came from the Netherlands to Wisconsin in 1893, founded St. Norbert College in 1898 to train young men for the Catholic priesthood. Soon they expanded the school, adding liberal arts and business programs--and, in 1952, women students.
Main Hall, the campus centerpiece, was built on a bluff overlooking the Fox River in 1903. For fifteen years, it housed almost all of the college’s facilities. W. E. Reynolds designed the building in the Richardsonian Romanesque Revival style, then popular for school buildings. The two-and-one-half-story edifice has a raised basement of rock-faced limestone, red brick walls, and a hipped slate roof with bracketed eaves. The central entry is a rugged stone arch that leads to a cross that rests atop squat columns with polished granite shafts. The three-story octagonal towers that anchor its northwest and southwest corners lend additional mass to the hall. Verticality comes from gabled wall dormers dominating the main facade and tall arched windows reaching upward to carved stone spandrels. The gable parapets jut through the eavesline like peaks. A rooftop belvedere, its slender Doric columns supporting a bracketed conical roof, caps the composition.
National And State Register Of Historic Places Listings
Architecture & History Inventory
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Bounded by Grant St, Lee J. Roemer Mall, Marsh St, and the Fox River
100001658
Located in De Pere, Brown County
