| Additional Information: | Upper half-story sheathed with vinyl siding. Stone outbuilding (summer kitchen?) to south of house. Also barn on property (no photo due to location/access).
Primarily side-gabled in form, this one-and-one-half-story house is faced with heavily mortared fieldstone on the first floor and vinyl siding on the upper half-story, which includes a shed-roof dormer on both the front and rear elevations. Oriented to the west, the home’s entrance is located at center and fronted by a small stoop, while a single, six-over-six-light sash window rests to either side. Windows throughout the remainder of the house are six-over-six-light sash, arranged singly and in pairs. A small fieldstone-constructed shed is located south of the house, while a bank barn is situated to the southwest.
Harold and Lula Christesen purchased the subject property by no later than 1935, at which time a different house was located on the parcel. Harold Christesen was born in Necedah, Wisconsin, in 1896 to Danish parents. A World War I veteran, Christesen wed Lula Edith Killion in Indiana in 1921. As of the 1930 census, Harold is identified as a thirty-four-year-old Fitchburg farmer, residing with Lula and their eldest three children: Ione, Robert and Eugene. By no later than 1935, the Christesens moved to the then 30-acre parcel on Irish Lane, by which time they had another son, Karol. Harold, who attended school until only sixth grade, appears to have dabbled in a number of occupations, including working as a salesman for Bowman Dairy, a gardener and a warehouse worker. According to a neighbor, Harold was also a stone mason and it was he who built the house. Initially the Christesens lived in the basement, which was completed in the 1940s. By 1952, the house was complete. That same year, Lula died and the house was sold the following year to Richard Maves. The Maves’ owned the house until circa 1964, when it was sold to Dr. John M. Opitz and his wife Marian.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1935, John Marius Opitz was a clinical geneticist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1964 to 1979. He and his mother immigrated to the United States in 1951 and settled in Iowa City, where his uncle was a music professor at the University of Iowa. John graduated from the University of Iowa in 1956 with a degree in Zoology and continued there in medical school, earning his MD in 1959 and where he remained for his internship. In 1961, Opitz married Marian Ohden (who earned a degree in nursing from the University of Iowa), as well as completed his residency at UW-Madison (where he served as chief resident), after which he completed a fellowship in Medical Genetics. In 1964, he joined the UW-Madison faculty as an assistant professor of Medical Genetics and Pediatrics and, in 1974, he founded the Clinical Genetics Unit. Four years later, he took a position at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana, and, as of 1998, he moved to join the faculty at the University of Utah Medical School. He is widely considered one of the world’s leaders in medical genetics, which is dedicated to identifying, treating and understanding genetic disorders. In fact, there are reportedly about 100 “Opitz” syndromes, named as such because he was involved in identifying them. In 2011, Opitz received the William Allan Award, the highest honor awarded by the American Society of Human Genetics. Opitz continues to reside in Utah. |
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| Bibliographic References: | For footnotes to 2019 survey write-up below, See the Historical & Architectural Resources Survey, City of Fitchburg, Dane County, Wisconsin, by Traci E. Schnell/tes | Historical Consulting, LLC, completed in 2019. |
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