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North Dakota » Southeast Region » By County » Ransom County » T. J. Walker Historic District and Rural School

T. J. Walker Historic District and Rural School

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c. 1885. 136 Mill Rd.
  • (Photograph by Steve C. Martens)

The T. J. Walker Historic District is a complex of structures associated with pioneer miller and merchant Tyler James Walker. These buildings include the remains of a mill and adjacent dam, a 1953 dam, a store, a house, a large barn, and an ice storage building. The timber-frame Walker Mill is the only remaining water-driven mill in North Dakota of an estimated twenty that were built in the state between 1875 and 1900.

The Walker house is a two-story T-plan, gabled wood-frame building with Queen Anne elements. The house’s gable end includes a two-story semi-hexagonal bay window with diagonal siding that contrasts with the horizontal lap siding. Wooden pendants adorn the eaves of the hipped-roof window bay, surmounted by a sunrise motif in radiating lap siding that fills the gabled end. The gabled two-story bank barn is built into the hillside north of the house. Its lower walls are of quarry-faced fieldstone and the upper level is one of the few North Dakota barns built of heavy wood beams with mortise-and-tenon joints fixed with wooden pegs. A cupola with a bellcast finial ventilates the warm, moist air. Nearby are two related significant buildings: Standing Rock Lutheran Church (c. 1890) and Fort Ransom (c. 1915) rural school, which is attributed to Hancock Brothers.

Writing Credits

Author: 
Steve C. Martens and Ronald H. L. M. Ramsay
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Data

Citation

Steve C. Martens and Ronald H. L. M. Ramsay, "T. J. Walker Historic District and Rural School", [Fort Ransom, North Dakota], SAH Archipedia, eds. Gabrielle Esperdy and Karen Kingsley, Charlottesville: UVaP, 2012—, http://sah-archipedia.org/buildings/ND-01-RM4.

Print Source

Cover: Buildings of North Dakota

Buildings of North Dakota, Steve C. Martens and Ronald H. L. M. Ramsay. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015, 58-58.

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