The Dean House: A UW Regent's Farm Saved from the Wrecking Ball
Near Madison, Wisconsin
The brick Italianate farmhouse at forty-seven eighteen Monona Drive was built around eighteen fifty-six for Nathaniel W. Dean, one of the more quietly influential figures in early Madison history. Dean arrived from Massachusetts, became a Regent of the University of Wisconsin, served in the State Assembly, and helped plan early university buildings and backed the third state capitol.
A private golf club purchased the house and grounds in nineteen twenty-two, and the City of Madison bought it six years later, using the old farmhouse as a public golf course clubhouse for decades. By nineteen seventy-one the city was ready to tear it down.
The newly formed Blooming Grove Historical Society intervened, saved the building, and restored it. The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen eighty and now operates as a small museum , one of the few surviving structures from the original farms that predated Madison's suburban expansion along the Lake Monona shoreline.
