| Additional Information: | A 'site file' exists for this property. It contains additional information such as correspondence, newspaper clippings, or historical information. It is a public record and may be viewed in person at the Wisconsin Historical Society, State Historic Preservation Office.
Sublime landscapes embodying the wonders of creation--Niagara Falls, the Rocky Mountains, Yellowstone, Yosemite--inspired a nascent tourist industry in the United States in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Among those who helped foster an appreciation of sublime landscapes was the naturalist John Muir, whose name became synonymous with the preservation of wilderness. He found his inspiration in the Dells of the Wisconsin River, located near his childhood home. Places like this, “tended by the Great Creator Himself," he wrote, “cut themselves keenly into our memories, and remain pictured in us forever."
Like Muir, tourists found inspiration in the Dells, especially after photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett began marketing stereoscopic images of this spectacular landscape. Visitors began to arrive in large numbers after 1871, when a side-wheel steamer initiated regularly scheduled sightseeing tours along the fifteen-mile stretch of the river that winds through Witches Gulch and Cold Water Canyon to Stand Rock. By the late 1920s, the Dells Boat Company boasted a "large fleet of luxurious and up-to-date Motor Boats and a modern oil-burning steel Steamer," which allowed visitors to see "the handiwork of nature."
In 1929, the Dells Boat Company, owned by G.H. Crandall, replaced its medieval-style tower at the Dells Boat Landing with a new structure meant to evoke a Mediterranean resort. Law, Law, and Porter of Madison created a design that harked back to an imagined past but had an up-to-date elevator to take visitors down two stories to the boat ramp. George Isenberg and Son were the contractors. At the street elevation, the stuccoed concrete building appears to be two stories tall, with an undulating canopy sheltering the two entrances and the ticket window in between. Above a row of rectangular windows protrude false rafter tails, carved to look like Spanish vigas (roof beams). From the water's edge the stuccoed, flat-roofed building rises a full four stories above a rubble foundation. Overlooking the water from the third floor, round-arched windows open onto metal balconets, and an arched doorway provides access to the boat ramp. The building terminates with a rooftop pergola at one corner and a balustraded square tower at the other. Clay tiles cover the roofs of both projections, carrying out the Mediterranean Revival theme. |
|---|
