Contact: Kara O’Keeffe Wisconsin Historical Society
E-Mail: [email protected]
Green Bay, Wis. – The Wisconsin Historical Society has announced the listing of Whitney School in the city of Green Bay, Brown County, in the National Register of Historic Places. National Register designation provides access to certain benefits, including qualification for grants and for rehabilitation income tax credits, while it does not restrict private property owners in the use of their property. Designed by architects Foeller and Schober, well known in Wisconsin as prolific school designers, the building was constructed in 1918 in the Neo-Classical Revival style.
The exterior is of red brick with limestone trim, and the sculptural panels in the parapet wall signify its purpose, each panel illustrated with a boy and a girl flanking a book and being watched over by an owl, symbolizing the building as a place of learning. This whimsical detail is carried over into the interior of the building, where there are similar sculptural panels above each water fountain in the corridors.
Since its inception in 1918, Whitney School was an important educational facility serving the growing population of Green Bay. Built during a wave of public school building during the early-twentieth century, it survives as one of only three examples to represent the boom in elementary school building in the city between 1900 and 1920. It was a school for six decades, serving many generations of children and as such plays an important role in the history of education in Green Bay. The register is the official national list of historic properties in America deemed worthy of preservation and is maintained by the National Park Service in the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Wisconsin Historical Society administers the program within Wisconsin. It includes sites, buildings, structures, objects and districts that are significant in national, state or local history, architecture, archaeology, engineering or culture.
To learn more about the State and National Register programs in Wisconsin, visit www.wisconsinhistory.org.
