Madison's Elmside

Here's a piece of Madison history that I discovered while biking -- just meandering around the near-east side. The Simeon and Maria Mills House is located in the hyphen-happy Schenk-Atwood-Starkweather-Yahara neighborhood, a little more othan 2 miles northeast of the Capitol Square.


The closely related Italianate and Italian Villa styles of architecture were extremely popular in the mid-to-late 19th century.



According to Historic Madison Inc., Madison residents referred to this Italianate mansion as "Mills' Folly". At that time, the location was considered an inconceivably long commute into town.



A February 6, 2006, Capital Times article notes that the Elmside area became a "streetcar suburb" in the early 20th century.

Elmside and University Heights are classic examples of "streetcar suburbs", an especially appealing urban development form of the early twentieth century. Streetcar suburbs could provide leafier refuges for those who did not like the more tightly developed urban core, but because most streetcar customers walked to their homes when they stepped down from the trolley, development still needed to be relatively compact. About eight homes per acre was average. Moreover, most of these streetcar "suburbs" were suburban only in the sense that they were somewhat less urban in design then the central city. It is important to note that these new neighborhoods were still within the municipal boundaries of the city, not separate municipal entities altogether.