Originally built as a home for an early Cedarburg settler, the southern half of the current Cedarburg Cultural Center building became a hotel and rooming house after Fred and Lena Beckman bought it in 1873 and remodeled it along the stagecoach route from Milwaukee to Green Bay. As the Wisconsin Hotel, it was modernized and later housed Beckman’s Bar, becoming a hub of the growing town where people could post events on a public bulletin board. In 1909 Fred Beckman transferred ownership to Joseph Herz, and in 1922 Herz sold the three-story building to John Alston, Sr., who continued the rooming house on the third floor and added a basement bowling alley, a variety store, and a men’s clothing store. In 1941 William and Mary Hickmann bought the variety store inventory and opened Hickmann’s Variety Store there, operating for nine years until losing their lease in 1950, when they moved to Washington Avenue and Alston turned the one thousand seven hundred-square-foot building over to John Alston, Jr. and LaVerne Alston. They renamed it Alston’s Department Store, added men’s and women’s clothing, and in 1964 expanded northward to fifteen thousand square feet. After thirty-seven years in business, they sold to a small department store chain that reduced operations back to the original southern building, leaving space for the Cedarburg Cultural Center. In 1988, under founder Carl Edquist, the expanding Cultural Center moved from the Lincoln Building into the newly available site, where it could house three art galleries, a performing arts center, classrooms, and space for historic Cedarburg artifacts. After the department store closed, the Cultural Center expanded again into the south building, adding larger classrooms and rentable property, and it now serves downtown Cedarburg as a center of art, music, and history while also operating the Cedarburg History Museum, Historic Kuhefuss House Museum, and Lincoln Building 1920s Schoolroom Museum.