A Peek Inside the Pump House & Other Surprises on the Washburn Tour of Homes

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When Denny Kilbane and his late wife, Georgann, bought the brownstone pump house from the city of Washburn, Wisconsin, they got a lakeshore property with 120 years of history … and some 23 tons of industrial equipment to move out of the basement and the remains of a 90-foot smoke stack in the back yard.

That the historic building would one day become an amazing, inviting home hardly seemed possible, perhaps to anyone but the Kilbanes back in 2009. The story of how that happened, and the proof that it did, will be part of the five-home tour planned by the Washburn Heritage Association in July this year. All five homes are on Pumphouse Road.

The pump house was never intended to be comfortable. Constructed in 1889, it was built to supply the city with available water and to avoid the disaster that had befallen Washburn just the year before when a fire swept through town and there was no way to access the Lake’s wet bounty. Thanks to that pump house with its 20-inch-diameter pipe directly into the Lake, Washburn was the first city in the region with running water for every resident. But times and technologies change, individual wells became popular and the pump house, built with locally quarried brownstone, was replaced as the city’s water source. It was used as a shop and office space for a time, but eventually fell into disrepair. The city put it up for auction and it caught the Kilbanes attention. They had the winning bid.

“When we first saw the building, the windows were broken, the doors were in really bad shape and they were using it as a machine shop,” Denny recalls. The public works staff had discovered the spot to be a great fishing hole, too. “They had penciled in notes on the wall of the ice-out date and the fish caught, right on the wall.”

The Kilbanes hired local architect, Jill Lorenz, to help turn the historic structure into a building with a future.

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CATHERINE LANGE

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Installed walls cover the dark brownstone, allow for insulation and give the home a cottage glow.

One challenge was to make the dark, cavernous work place into a welcoming home space. They replaced the windows, though Jill was hesitant when Denny suggested white frames, which turned out just right to brighten the dark stone inside and out. She did win out with her suggestion to cover some of the interior brownstone in favor of walls that allowed insulation behind them.

“The brownstone is dark,” Jill told the Kilbanes. “Do you really want to live with that? … We never looked back once they got on board.”

The next problem was a little trickier to tackle. The windows were too high above the floor to see out comfortably. When brownstone is the wall material, it’s not the easiest to cut through to relocate the windows. The solution was to raise the floor, about 20 inches or so.

The half of the building once a machine shop remained as the “attached” garage while the other half houses the kitchen/living/dining great room and a single bedroom.

Denny says he and his wife, Catherine, look forward to visitors and neighbors coming to see how welcoming the pump house space can be. An avid boater who’s “circumnavigated Lake Superior probably four times,” he loves his Washburn seasonal home, where the fishing and the swimming is good. “I’ve said it to a lot of people: The Chequamegon Bay is the Mediterranean of Lake Superior.”

The Tour

Washburn Heritage Association hosts “Living by the Lake,” its fourth home tour, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. July 28.

Besides the Pump House, the self-guided tour will feature Jeanne & John Pitblado’s 1913 lakeshore cabin built by Jeanne’s father; the Sprague cottage built in 1895 by Milton Sprague, great-grandfather of the current owners; White Wings cottage built in 1938 by John Bowles, early superintendent of Washburn Water Department, and now owned by his descendants; and Carla and Peter Bremner’s 1970 home built on the site of a former 9-hole golf course, Washburn’s first. Carla is also president of the association.

The $10 tour tickets will be on sale the day of the tour or visit www.WashburnHeritage.org.