You really can’t miss it when driving on Glenview Avenue in Tosa. The Queen Anne home at 1171 Glenview has a polygonal turret, a porch with fluted ionic columns and a handsome paint job.

These days, the house – built in 1900 – also has a Homeowners Concept sign perched on a post in the front yard noting that it is expected to hit the market soon.

The four-bedroom, 2.5-bath, 2,477-square-foot house hasn’t sold since 2005, when it fetched $392,000.

Whenever I see a place like this, I can’t help but do a little digging.

The earliest residents I found were Bremen, Germany-born optician Dr. Francis F. Cobabe and his wife Ethel, who held History Club meetings in the house for a number of years, as early as 1910. It's possible they were the ones who had the home built.

They were there in July 1913 when lightning struck the house causing a fire. The Cobabes were awakened to find "a flame four feet in length ... shooting from a hole in a gas pipe on the first floor."

I also found the Niesens, who were there much later.

Margaret was a nurse who died in 1947 at age 46 at Muirdale Sanitarium not far away on Watertown Plank Road after becoming ill three years earlier while working as an obstetrics nurse at St. Michael’s Hospital.

Her husband Alfred, a longtime history teacher at the Milwaukee Vocational School – now called MATC – died four years later at the Veterans Hospital at the Old Soldiers Home.

Oddly, before they arrived in the house around 1943-4, the beautiful home sat vacant for a few years, which made me curious to see what had happened before.

That’s when I found the Jessels, who have a very interesting story.

Arthur Jessel was born in Buffalo, New York in 1878 and graduated from the University of Buffalo dental school. Somehow, he ended up going to Sweden in 1899 to become the assistant to the royal dentist in the palace at Stockholm.

In 1904 he was appointed royal dentist by King Gustav V and he continued in that role until 1922.

While he was there, he attended to not only the king but also his family, including Princess Astrid, who later, as Queen Astrid of Belgium would, famously, perish when the car her husband King Leopold III was driving hit a tree.

After her death, Jessel would describe Astrid, “as a very sweet and natural woman without a trace of aloofness.”

He said that the entire royal family was quite down to earth, in fact.

“When he began practice with the royal family he was astounded that they all, except the queen, insisted on having their dental work done in his own office,” a newspaper noted.

“I worked on all 32 members of the royal family,” Jessel told the Milwaukee Journal in 1929. “Among these were Count Folke Bernadotte and Countess Elsa Bernadotte. I took care of them as children.

“The king himself was a very democratic fellow and not a bad man to have as a ruler. However, he was very sensitive when I probed for cavities and sometimes I had a hard time holding him down. He was inclined to squirm around in the dentists’ chair and the sight of the drill made him nervous.”

One of his royal patients later became the queen of Denmark.

Despite having renounced his American citizenship when he went to Sweden – for diplomatic reasons, he said – Jessel’s children born in Sweden were American citizens, perhaps because his Buffalo-born wife Frances O'Conor, whom he married in Stockholm in 1907, had not renounced her citizenship.

The Jessels returned to the United States in 1922, somehow ending up in Wauwatosa (perhaps because Jessel's brother lived here), the same year Dr. Cobabe died. Their children at that point were around 12, 10 and 8.

“Although I enjoyed working in Sweden I am happy to become an American again,” Jessel told the Journal. “My three children were born in Stockholm, but I’ve always wanted to bring them up as Americans in this country.”

King Gustav Adolf knighted Jessel, who also received a number of other official honors.

It appears that the Jessels moved into the Glenview Avenue house almost immediately upon arriving in the Milwaukee area, where Jessel opened up a dental practice in the Majestic Building near 3rd and Wisconsin downtown.

Certainly by 1924 they were listed at the address, which was then 201 Greenfield Ave.

Jessel became well-known in town fairly rapidly. By 1929, an announcement that he’d regained his American citizenship was accompanied by a fairly large photo of the doctor with Prince William of Sweden taken during the prince’s visit to Milwaukee.

In addition to his own practice, from which he retired in 1960, Jessel taught preventive dentistry at Marquette University dental school from 1925 until 1935.

It’s not clear why the Jessels left the Glenview house, though by the time  departure came shortly after Frances Jessel’s death from a heart ailment in April 1937.

The 1950 census shows Arthur living a couple doors down at 1161 Glenview with his daughter Grace in a house that appears to have previously been occupied by his brother Henry and his family.

Perhaps the big old place with the turret had become too much for a widower whose children had grown.

Jessel passed away in 1969.

The house is currently on the "coming soon" section of the Homeowners Concept website, listed at just under $750,000. So if you’re interested in this beauty with an interesting bit of Swedish dental history, keep your eyes peeled.