On the south side of Geneva Lake sits Black Point Estate & Gardens, a 20-room Queen-Anne style mansion built in 1888 by beer baron Conrad Seipp. The property is one of the Wisconsin Historical Society’s 11 historic sites.
Black Point offers guests a glimpse into the Gilded Age and Victorian Era. Today, visitors arrive by boat, just like Seipp and his guests did.
“You still get the experience of what it was like to come here and do a little bit of time travel,” says Dave Desimone, director of Black Point Estate.
Seipp, born in 1825, was a German immigrant who established his brewing business in Chicago in 1854. He gained prominence among the beer barons of the era for his innovations in refrigeration, distribution and marketing. His brewery was one of the few to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
“Seipp is a long forgotten name in American brewing history,” Desimone says. “But at one point, in the 1870s, he’s the largest producer of beer in the United States.”
The mansion served as the Seipp family’s summer retreat. The 8,000-square-foot home was designed to host and entertain. The first floor featured a living room, music room, billiard room and dining room. The second floor housed six bedrooms and the third floor added seven more, totaling 13 bedrooms in the house.
A standout feature of the estate is its tower, accessible by using a skeleton key in one of the bedrooms. A narrow spiral staircase leads to the tower’s grand view from 120 feet above the lake.
Seipp was only able to enjoy Black Point Estate for two seasons before his death in 1890. However, his family and seven generations of descendants maintained the estate. That’s why some of the property’s features are preserved from its inception while more modern artifacts serve as remnants of the decades that passed.
“Think about what your house looked like. What my house looked like,” Desimone says. “Most of us didn't have 125-year-old beds that we were still using. They never updated anything here. They just kept it frozen in time.”
Desimone adds that most bookcases display texts from the 1880s through the 1920s, “But every so often you'll find the DVD tucked in somewhere.”
“That's sort of the story,” he says. “A historic house that also is layered over time.”
Today, the mission of Black Point Estate is more than just sharing the Seipp story. Desimone hopes visitors leave feeling excited and empowered about historic places. He says it took about 10 years to save the property through various legal processes and approvals.
“We want people when they leave here to just be a little bit more aware of the value of historic preservation and that it's not impossible,” he says.
