Added about 1920, the same time the fancy stairway to the second floor and the large front porch were added. Prior to that it was use a chamber pot or go in the back yard to use the outhouse. Even in the cold Northern Wisconsin winters!

How do we know the dates of the additions to this building?  If you have done any research on genealogy on your family you know you can find almost everything these days. It is a little scary how much stuff you can actually find these days about family members and you can do something similar with buildings.

So when a building is first built usually you can go to the courthouse and find if a mortgage was recorded. That will most likely tell you the year that the building was built, but when it comes to remodeling, or additions, they didn't always take loans out so it didn't always get recorded like that.  However there was a company called the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Company's that traveled to each city on a fixed schedule, every X number of years, and they would come to the community and walk around and actually draw out the footprint of all the buildings in the city. This was then used by Insurance Companies to come up with a premium to charge for fire insurance policies. Insurance companies didn't have the staff that could do that so they would rely on the Sanborn Fire Insurance maps. Let's use an example to see how it was done and assume they came to Rhinelander every five years. So in 1890 there would be an empty lot here because this house wasn’t built until 1894. Then in 1895 there would've been a square block showing the outside shape of this house.  It would have stayed that way for the following updates until about 1920 where you would see three additions, a little box drawn on the back which would be for the bathroom added, then a little addition over on the right front side where the fancy stairway was added and finally the shape of the front porch was drawn in.  So within five or so years, you can date major remodeling things that were done.  Copies of these maps are available at the local Library (some hard copy and some on microfilm).

Bathroom Highlights

Listed below are a few of the items in this room that you may be interested in learning more about.

Claw Foot Bathtub

An indoor bathroom was not added to this house until approximately 1920.  Here is an example of a period correct Claw Foot Bathtub, so named because of the design of the tub’s feet. Inside the tub is a Soap Saver. A devise used to swish bars of soap in the tub full of water to make it soapy. Most like only bars that were getting too small to use for washing then ended their lives in this type of service.

Old Style Toilet

While the toilet in this house is a replica, this ‘gravity fed’ type of toilet was what would have been period correct for this house.  The tank above would fill with water and then gravity would carry it down with force to flush the toilet.