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Set off from neighboring houses by its broad lawn and ornate iron fence, this showy mansion flaunts the prosperity of Chippewa Falls’ late-nineteenth-century lumber trade. From 1887 until his death in 1914, lumber-company executive Edward Rutledge lived here. Rutledge first worked as a “timber cruiser” for lumber magnate Frederick Weyerhaeuser, assessing the value of prospective timberland purchases, but when Weyerhaeuser bought the Chippewa Lumber and Boom Company in 1881, he made Rutledge its vice president. At that time, the firm’s sawmill was one of the world’s largest, and Rutledge became a millionaire.
The rear wing of the Rutledge House was once the whole house. Built around 1869, it was home to E. D. Rand, part-owner of yet another local lumber firm that Weyerhaeuser would eventually absorb into his system of interlocking syndicates. It took on its present look in 1887, when Rutledge moved in. To convey his prosperity, he more than doubled the dwelling’s size and dressed it with High Victorian Italianate details. The large front section Rutledge added bears the same Italianate traits as the original section to the rear: tall narrow windows (some with brick hood moldings), quoins edging the red-brick walls, a denticulated cornice with paired brackets, and a low-pitched hipped roof. But it adds porches, a polygonal bay, and an enormous rooftop belvedere, whose flaring roof bears ocular dormers and culminates in a lacy iron cresting.
Rutledge, like many newly minted millionaires, was more interested in flaunting wealth than adhering to a particular style. Notice such features from the Queen Anne style as the second-story windows grouped in segmentally arched pairs with frilly iron balconets and the stained-glass transoms that crown the picture window under the front porch. Porches with lattice railings and a cross-gabled porte-cochère with semi-elliptical openings were frequent elements in Victorian houses.
The Chippewa County Historical Society maintains the house as a museum.
National And State Register Of Historic Places Listings
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