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Cora Tuttle was born Cora Cadwallader in 1864 near Evansville, Wisconsin. She married Charles M. Tuttle in 1890, and by 1900 was living in the Town of Brooklyn, Wisconsin. In 1904 Cora, Charles, their nephew Eugene Cadwallader Smith moved to Ganado, Texas. Charles died there in 1906. By that time, Cora had three sons, and her nephew Eugene had moved to Prescott, Arizona. After Charles died, Cora moved to Prescott with her sons to live with Eugene’s family. By 1908, Cora and her son's Ray, Clifton, and Fordyce moved to Madison, so Ray could attend engineering school at the University of Wisconsin. Tuttle, with no formal architectural training, designed a Bungalow for her own family. In 1909, she assembled craftspeople to build a house for herself at 1206 Grant Street.
The house was unique in Madison and drew on Tuttle’s understanding of the Bungalow style as refined by architects in California, a style she had likely been exposed to while living in the southwest. The building introduced the style to Madison. Tuttle was the first known woman architectural designer in Wisconsin, and the only known woman to be designing buildings in Madison before the 1930s. The first licensed woman architect in the state was Lillian Leenhouts of Milwaukee, who began practicing in her family’s office in 1942.
Tuttle gained a reputation for designing bungalows at a time when the style was becoming widely popular nationwide and in Madison. Over the next twenty years, Cora Tuttle designed about fifteen more homes that were built in the city, often in collaboration with her son Ray, who had studied structural engineering, and her nephew Eugene, who had returned to Madison in 1911 to care for his aging parents. Cora Tuttle lived in the house at 1206 Grant Street until she left Madison around 1931 and moved to Rochester, New York. She died in 1948.
Cora Tuttle is locally significant in the area of Architecture from 1909 to 1931. During this time, she lived in the house at 1206 Grant Street.
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