Clark Leonard Hull came to Madison, Wisconsin in 1914 to pursue a PhD in psychology. I wouldn’t know very much about him if not for the practice of the American Psychological Association and the National Academy of Science to issue biographies of their more esteemed members. After I lived in The Temporary House (TTH) for a while, I became convinced that the hous
e was not built by a contractor or builder. The house had many odd features and so I began to try to figure out who lived in the house and who built it. First I went to the Wisconsin Historical Society basement and looked through the City Directories until I could figure out who first lived in the house. Then I wondered if this person was “famous” in some sense, so I looked him up in Who’s Who. By golly, it turned out Clark Leonard Hull was a fellow of some accomplishment. Hull was born on a log farmhouse in Akron, New York in 1884. His family moved to Michigan where he went to school in a one room school house. He attended high school at Alma Academy and later Alma College during which time he contracted typhoid and then polio. Both illnesses caused him to drop out of school and left him with a permanent need for a leg brace. With his health regained he went to the University of Michigan and graduated with a BA in 1913. After teaching for a year he entered the University of Wisconsin graduate school. Now, I am telling you this story because Hull was a remarkable guy. He came to UW Madison in 1914 and entered the PhD program. He was a teaching assistant his first year and a lecturer his second. By 1918 he had his degree and joined the faculty and by 1922 he had tenure. He began building the house by himself around the time he got tenure, published prolifically, and invented in 1924 a machine to handle the tedious statistical calculations that his experimental studies required. He also designed and built his leg brace. By 1925 the house was finished. In 1929 Hull left Wisconsin for Yale, where he became the Sterling Professor of Psychology. He continued his research until his death in 1952. If you are interested in his academic history, there are plenty of sources on the web.
So far I have been unable to find primary documents about the house, except when it first appeared on the tax roles. After having lived in the house for 28 years, I surmise that Hull started with a basic house design and then made some modifications. Some were clever and some led to structural problems that I now will fix. Next up—the problems.