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CG2 also City Hall, Jonesboro, by Elmer Stuck (Photograph by Claudia Shannon)
Elmer A. Stuck designed this Postmodern Federal-style former bank shortly before his death in 1978 for his cousin, William Stuck. The red brick building is a one-and-a-half-story version of the eighteenth-century Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg. It has four dormer windows in the high hipped roof, end chimneys, a broken pediment and urn over the central entrance, tall multipaned windows with fanlights, and a tall and slender wooden cupola. The building’s historical references and elegance made it suitable for its previous function as a city hall but perhaps unexpected for its current use as a supplier of services to federal, state, and local jails.
Elmer A. Stuck was an important figure in Jonesboro’s history and for architecture in Arkansas. He began his architectural practice in this town in 1926 and then worked in Little Rock, before returning here. Stuck’s firm expanded over the years, and many architects who worked in northeast Arkansas in the twentieth century started out in his office. Interestingly, one of his first commissions, a 1927 duplex apartment in the Tudor style, sits diagonally across the street.