| Additional Information: | In the 1840s and 1850s, a group of twenty-two German-speaking Swiss immigrants from Canton Graubünden developed this rural community along the branches of Honey Creek, where they found a pastoral landscape of rolling farmland, wooded hills, and wetlands. Today, the historic district encompasses approximately twelve square miles and includes forty-six farmsteads.
The houses, barns, granaries, churches, and cemeteries evolved over three generations. A handful of the extant buildings date from the first generation: log homes subsequently covered with clapboard. Their children constructed their homes of dolomite, the local limestone with a warm yellow color. Six gabled-ell houses, built of dolomite between 1857 and 1884, display the skills of a John Peter Felix and Peter Kindschi, who had emigrated from Switzerland, and Caspar Steuber, who hailed from the Waldeck region, now central Germany. All three excelled in an unusual technique known as block-and-stack construction.
By the late 1880s, the popularity of block-and-stack construction had waned, and the grandchildren of the area’s original Swiss settlers began building balloon-frame houses in the Queen Anne fashion. Among these is the Ploetz Farmstead, built in 1893, with the cross-gabled roof, patterned shingles, scroll-sawn brackets, spindled frieze, turned columns, and sunburst brackets typical of the style. |
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