By the 1880s, Kewaunee, on the western shore of Lake Michigan, had become an important mill town and shipping port for the lumber industry. Workers floated vast numbers of logs down the Kewaunee River to Kewaunee sawmills and then loaded the milled lumber onto schooners heading across the Great Lakes or later onto railroad cars. When logging waned, new industries took its place, including the Leyse Aluminum Company and the Kewaunee Manufacturing Company, the latter specializing in the fabrication of laboratory furniture. Kewaunee’s prosperity is evident in the Marquette Historic District, historically the home of the community’s lumber barons and merchants. Situated on a crest overlooking the lake, the neighborhood consists mostly of two-story wooden houses in the fashionable styles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
In 1881, Joseph Duvall, a leading merchant and grain elevator operator, built the neighborhood’s first mansion at 815 Milwaukee Street, a cream brick Italianate edifice with pedimented gables and octagonal bay windows. The front porch was replaced and a side porch converted into a sunroom, probably in the 1910s or 1920s. Today the building serves as a bed-and-breakfast. Half a century later, well-to-do families favored the Tudor Revival style. One example is the Leo and Vera Bruemmer House (1929; 1122 Milwaukee) clad in brick and covered by a steeply pitched hipped roof. Asymmetrical massing and false half-timbering, filled variously with stucco or brickwork in herringbone and basket-weave patterns, typify Tudor Revival.
John and Augusta Dishmaker, a leading mercantile family, built the two-and-a-half-story, clapboard Queen Anne house at 903 Dodge Street in 1900. It has a steeply pitched hipped roof with flared eaves and hipped dormers with scalloped shingles. Trios of Tuscan columns support the one-story balustraded porch, reflecting the emerging popularity of Colonial Revival. In 1883, Henry C. Koch of Milwaukee designed the neighborhood’s best example of Queen Anne for George and Bertha Grimmer at 821 Dodge. At one time a partner of Joseph Duvall, Grimmer made his fortune in lumber. Carpenter Charles Krause built the clapboard house, whose walls are enriched with horizontal and vertical wooden strips suggesting half-timbering, quatrefoils on the attic story, spool-and-spindle balustrades on the porch, and an elaborate brick chimney. Visually balancing the porch, a small sunroom with tall multilight windows stands at the southeast corner.