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(Photograph by Bill Guerin, courtesy of the Wisconsin Historical Society)
A rare intact example of a turn-of-the-twentieth century hotel that catered to traveling salesmen and others of modest means, the former Hotel Clements served passengers arriving on the Chicago and North Western Railway, whose tracks ran just a block away. The building typifies the era’s railroad hotels. It began at half its present size when Alfred Clements commissioned the initial two-story building sometime before 1892. By 1898, he doubled the width of the facade and ran a porch across the front. Turned columns support the porch and a restored spindle balustrade. A fish-scale-shingled frieze and a bracketed cornice cap the clapboard walls. Tall, narrow second-story windows regularly punctuate the horizontal line of the frieze, a rhythm echoed below by the many narrow doors that open onto the full-width porch.