Muesse & Brooker Building - Courthouse Square Historic District - Lancaster, Wisconsin - NRHP Historic Districts - Contributing Buildings on Waymarking.com

Historic Name	Address	Date of Construction	Architectural Style
Muesse & Brooker Building	137 South Jefferson Street	1894-1895	High Victorian Italianate
Among the most interesting buildings in the district are those whose principal facades feature second stories that are clad in sheets of stamped, galvanized iron. These were the product of a late nineteenth century manufacturing method whose intent was to create-or recreate, at a much lower cost, the kind of elaborate facade treatments that the earlier cast iron storefronts that began to appear in the United States in the mid-1850s had made possible. Sheets produced by the new method could be applied directly over a conventional wood or masonry facade and they could be made to resemble elements that represented any period or style. Whole storefronts and upper stories could be purchased out of manufacturer's catalogs or individual elements could be ordered separately and then combined on the exterior of a building in much the same way that factory-made wooden trim elements could be combined in the interiors of the period. The results produced rich visual effects that appeared to be custom made but which were actually assembled out of pre-fabricated pieces. The Muesse & Brooker double store building is an excellent example of the application of this new technology. This rectilinear plan, two-story commercial building has brick exterior walls and a main facade that faces east onto S. Jefferson St. It was originally designed to house two stores in its first story and office space in the story above. The first story's original storefronts have been replaced with modern ones, but the entire original seven-bay-wide second story is completely intact and is in excellent condition. This story consists of seven individual window openings that are flanked on either side by a pair of small Ionic Order pilasters that stand on plinth blocks, and these pilasters appear to support an elaborate fascia that is ornamented with patera and which is crowned with a tall, overhanging bracketed cornice. The classically derived designs of these elements and the high degree of elaboration that characterizes the overall design of this story places it within the High Victorian Italianate style and even the loss of its original first story does not prevent this from being one of the district's most notable buildings. Henry Muesse, one of the owners of this building, was, along with his brother George, a notable Lancaster-based contractor and lumberyard owner and he was, in all probability, responsible for the construction of his own block as well.