Frederick Weistar House
house in Chester, Illinois, United States
The Frederick Weistar House is a historic stone cottage house at 515 Chestnut Street in Chester, Illinois. The house was built circa 1859 for Frederick Weistar, a Swiss immigrant. The house has a vernacular design with a two-door facade pattern, in which two front doors provided access to each of the house's two first-floor rooms. The house itself was two rooms wide and one room deep which provided access to most of the house. While the two-door facade is common in vernacular architecture, the purpose of the two doors is historically disputed; as the form is especially prevalent in German vernacular architecture, it may have been inspired by traditional German architecture, though it may have also functioned as a way to separate public and private spaces in a home. This particular design of house was very popular for single-family residences. The one-story limestone house also features a wooden front porch with carved columns and brackets, its only significant decorative element.
On the outside front of the house remains a plaque that states "Stone Cottage 1850 on Lot 20 deeded to John & Samuel Lybarger Descendants of Revolutionary War Patriots Ludwick Lybarger and Jean Baptiste Montreuil". The house allows visitors to see a more modest Family home that was built in the mid 1800s to get a better understanding of life during this time period.
The house was added to the National Register of Historic Places (#100002573) on June 15, 2018; its name was misspelled "Frederick Weister House" in its listing.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Frederick Weistar House” is house in Chester, Illinois, United States. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Frederick, Weistar and House, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “house in Chester, Illinois, United States” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q77080874. Authority coordinates are 37.904, -89.829. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1859, 1850 and 2018.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.
- Subject orientation
- Search vocabulary
- Locating named sources
The closest primary source, responsible institution and strongest cited specialist reference.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Frederick Weistar House”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow Frederick Weistar House primary sources, Frederick Weistar House archive and Frederick research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Frederick Weistar House”?
- Which institution is responsible for the underlying evidence?
- Which cited source is closest to the event, object or claim?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “Frederick Weistar House” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.