Erbach house finds new life as Black Creek Inn

When Ruth and John Weiler first bought the old Erbach house on the outskirts of Athens nine years ago, they saw the 19th century building purely as an investment.

“The goal was to flip it,” Ruth said. “We thought it would take two or three years, doing most of the work ourselves, and then we would sell it.”

Having both grown up in Athens, Ruth and John had always taken notice of the three-story house on the north edge of the village, so when it went up for auction in 2016, they decided to attend an open house just to check out the inside. They found themselves entranced by the house, going up and down the stairs multiple times.

Ruth remembers overhearing other people at the open house talking about knocking down walls and making other major changes, but she and her husband felt that it should stay the way it was, so they decided to submit what turned out to be the winning bid. Having sat empty for about three years, the house was now theirs.

“Then the work started,” she said. When renovating an old house, Ruth said it’s important to realize what work you can reasonably do yourself and what needs to be done by a contractor. John is an electrician, so he was able to rewire the house from top to bottom, and together they were able to hang a lot of the drywall themselves. The exception was the 10-foot-high ceilings on the main floor.

“I told my husband, ‘John, if you and I try to hang that sheet rock, somebody’s going to die, either accidentally or on purpose,” she said, laughing. “It’s not easy.”

Likewise, they realized that installing a new steel roof was a job best left to professionals.

“It’s three stories high, so we weren’t going up there,” she said. “We hired somebody to do that.”

Still, much of the work was done by the couple themselves, who fully insulated the house for the first time in its existence, replaced or patched the plaster in all the rooms and refurbished each of the five bedrooms and three bathrooms upstairs, along with the five living spaces on the main floor, including the kitchen, dining room and parlor.

The third floor is “not just an attic,” Ruth said, noting that it used to serve as play rooms for kids and has enough space for more than one bedroom.

Ruth said they still have some projects they would like to get done, but after they had refurnished a few of the upstairs rooms and made the downstairs presentable, they started to let close friends and relatives stay there. Five years ago, they opened the house up to paid guests as the newly renamed Black Creek Inn.

John and Ruth do not live at the house, so guests are responsible for making their own meals in the full-equipped kitchen while enjoying a piece of local history that’s not far from downtown.

“During the Athens Fair it’s very popular,” she said.

A house with history

The history of the former Erbach house is deeply intertwined with the village of Athens itself.

Alfred Rietbrock, a lawyer and former judge from Milwaukee, first came to Marathon County for some court proceedings in Wausau in the late 1800s and discovered the seemingly endless forest that made up Central Wisconsin at the time.

“This was all woodland, everything,” Ruth said. “They were settling into Hamburg and found the land was very good for agriculture.”

Rietbrock and his two law partners, Halsey and Johnson (all three are the namesakes of rural townships in northern Marathon County) decided to buy 50,000 acres of woods.

“It was mostly Mr. Riebrock’s idea,” she said. “He talked his partners into it, I’ve read.”

Rietbrock went one step further and decided to establish a new village among the woods; he and the local surveyor sectioned off 80-acre parcels in the area that is now Athens. He even designed the village square area where the gazebo now sits.

“That was his idea,” Ruth said. To populate the new community, Rietbrock recruited German and Polish immigrants to come and start farms here.

“They did that because the climate here is very similar to the climate there (central Europe), and this was going to be a lot of hard work, and those people were noted for working hard,” Ruth said.

Ruth is not sure exactly what year the Erbach house was built, but it takes its name from the original owner, William Erbach, who married Rietbrock’s daughter, Marianna, in 1895. The following year, Rietbrock brought his daughter’s family up to Athens so William could oversee construction of the new village.

William and Marianna started having children right away, so Ruth figures the family settled into the home sometime before 1899, which is when Rietbrock built the Helendale Farm, a state-of-the-art Guernsey operation.

Erbach, who had a degree in mechanical engineering, apparently made quite an impression on the local population.

“He was a very intelligent, very kind man,” Ruth said. “People deeply respected him here.”

It just so happens that the Weiland family, John’s ancestors, bought their family homestead from Rietbrock in 1883, and the couple still lives there today. John had also done some work for Jean Perkins, who raised her family in the old Erbach house starting in the late 1960s and continued to live there until she passed away in 2013.

Because either the Erbachs or the Perkins family owned the house throughout the entire 20th century and into the 21st, the Weilers are only the third set of owners.

Last October, the Marathon County Historical Society held an event at the house, with historian Gary Gisselman putting on back-to-back slideshows, featuring pictures and historical items, for a group of 30 mostly local residents. The event was arranged by Kitty Roesler, the librarian at the Athens Branch Library and Ruth’s sister-inlaw.

Ruth said they would be open to hosting more historical events in the future.

“I think we learned a lot from the first presentation, things we might do differently or not,” she said.

What’s the same, what’s changed?

While refurnishing the Erbach house from scratch, Ruth found a lot of antique light fixtures and other items that are either from the late 19th century or made to look like they’re from that era. She went one step further, though, and reached out to one of the Erbachs’ great-grandsons, Peter, who brought her two bins of pictures and documents related to the home.

Peter also allowed the Weilers to reclaim several pieces of old furniture that were originally in the house, including some bedroom items, dressers and a marble-topped living room table made in Milwaukee. Prior to being repatriated, the furniture had just been sitting in storage.

Ruth said they have also been able to fill in some of the gaps in their knowledge of the house by reading old newspaper articles and talking to older Athens folks who knew the Erbachs. As owners of the most prominent house around at the time, Ruth said the Erbachs were “very welcoming to the people of the area,” which left a lasting impression that still endears many people to the home.

Though the Weilers have largely reimagined the home based on their best guess of what it originally looked like inside, they did keep some of the finer details untouched, such as the wainscoting.

“If you try to take wainscoting off, it’s going to break,” Ruth noted.

While pulling off some old wallpaper from the ceilings, they discovered architectural paintings in three of the rooms, with hand-painted borders, rectangular shapes, ivy leaves and grapes.

“I wish I could find someone who would redo it,” Ruth said, noting she has still has pictures of the old paintings and pieces of the original plaster as a color reference.

The Weilers have also spent a fair amount of time working on the two acres of land surrounding the house. She said they’ve found evidence of old landscaping materials, and she knows that the Erbachs at one time hired a gardener who came up from Milwaukee and slept in the screened-in porch during the summers so he could work on the grounds.

“We had heard how beautiful the yard was,” she said. “There would be flowers all over.”

None of this historical renovation would likely have happened had the Weilers not decided to put in a bid on the house almost a decade ago.

“By the time we finished renovating the last of the bedrooms, it was apparent that people really appreciated the house, the history and having a space to stay,” she said. “And, so, we just never talked again about selling it. Plus, we had kind of fallen in love with it.”