515 North Pinckney Street
The Frances and Adolph Marschall House
a beautiful old Prairie-style house in Madison, Wisconsin.
The next time you find yourself pondering the tasty goodness of your favorite Wisconsin cheese you might give some consideration to the guy who built this house on North Pinckney Street. This is where Adolph Marschall lived most of his life with his wife Frances, their daughter Kathryn and their son, Charles.
Marschall was a Danish chemist who’d been working for a Copenhagen-based pharmaceutical company in New York since 1893 when he learned that the American dairy industry hadn’t yet worked out a way to manufacture a reliably consistent and pure supply of rennet, the stuff that curdles milk into cheese. Marschall was not only sharp enough to recognize a lucrative business opportunity when he saw it, he also had the bedrock self-confidence to pack up and move with his wife of two years, Frances, to the Midwest, the best place to sell cheese-making stuff. In 1905 Adolph and Frances settled in Madison, where Adolph founded the Marschall Dairy Laboratory in a shop on Proudfit Street the next year.
He must have been a savvy business man on top of everything else because he was selling an awful lot of rennet in a relatively short time. His lab began production in 1907 and by 1911 Marschall had to tack an addition on the original building to handle the increased demand. And he must have done pretty well for himself and his family to hire Madison architects Claude and Starck to design this prairie-style house in 1912, just five years after his new business was up and running.
ACCORDING TO SOURCES:
Madison City Directory 1914 – 1954
Quaife, Milo M., Wisconsin: Its history and its people, 1634 – 1924, S.J. Clarke Publishing Co., Chicago, 1924, 4 vols, illus.
Text and photographs © 2007 Dave Okonski except where noted.
Built: 1912
Style: Prairie
brick, stucco, wood trim
Architects: Claude & Starck
Use: apartments
Legal Description:
Parcel No.:
AHI #37132