Welcome!

This is Wisconsin City, a blog about the buildings, architecture, and other aspects of the built environment in Rock County. This includes the cities of Beloit, Edgerton, Evansville, Janesville, and Milton, the villages of Clinton, Footville, and Orfordville, and all of the townships.

The main focus of the blog will be current photography of the historic structures in these communities, with commentary and opinion about their architecture, current state of renovation or neglect, and potential future outcomes. As I have other interests, such as urban planning, sustainability, and modern architecture, these will make appearances as well.

In 1975, I participated as an unofficial intern in the production of an historic survey, published as Rock County Historic Sites and Buildings, which was prepared on behalf of the Janesville Bicentennial Commission and Rock County Planning Department, and edited by my father, Richard P. Hartung, and his dear friend colleague Nancy Belle S. Douglas. This book was the eventual basis for several nominations to the National Register of Historic Places, including the historic districts of Janesville and Beloit. My role was minor: reading maps, checking off lists, and sorting photographs. The book was important to my father, and he always hoped to produce a revised version. Unfortunately, he is now incapacitated professionally with frontotemporal dementia and living in a nursing home. As such, this project is something of a personal legacy for me.

I hope over the next few years to rephotograph every site that was inventoried -- approximately 3000 total -- and show its current state. Sadly, many historic structures that were noted in this survey have since been lost, either to the ravages of time or to development. It is striking to me how severely a resource can be depleted in just a single generation. Rock County, for example, has a rare concentration of cobblestone houses, which were built in only a few parts of the United States; but we may have lost as many as one third of the structures that were extant in 1975.

Through this project I hope to educate my readers a little bit about the aesthetics and importance of historic architecture, how to preserve and rehabilitate it, how to make adaptive reuse work for historic structures, and how it can be a tool in a community's quality of life and economic sustainability.


The name, Wisconsin City, comes from an early community that was platted in Rock County but never chartered, and is now largely within the city of Janesville. The intended city, along the west bank where the Rock River Parkway and Afton Road now run, would have taken advantage of the calm river south of the rapids now the site of Monterey Dam as an anchorage for steamboats plying the Rock River from its junction with the Mississippi. Instead, the ferry of Henry Janes, where the Milwaukee Street Bridge is now located, and the later railroads dictated the geography and success of Janesville. The property was sold for farms and the plat abandoned. To me, the name evokes the envisioned prosperity and settlement of Wisconsin.