This is one of several towns in Iowa that was specifically established to be a county seat. The site was selected because of its central location within the county. A courthouse was built, and the platting of the town site took place in 1865. The community grew slowly over...
The platting of Clarksville's grid took place in 1853. It was advantageously sited on the Shellrock River which provided the usual much-needed water power. By the mid-1870s the community was traversed by two railroads. There are several nineteenth-century commercial...
Within the town of Dakota City, the Humboldt County Courthouse ( NO091) is especially noteworthy for its PWA Moderne style. Three-and-a-half miles south of Dakota City (on route P56) is the Old Mill Farm, the site of a...
With its abundance of springs and timbered hills, the site of Decorah had been the location of Indian occupation. In 1857 it was noted that a number of mounds “had been leveled [in 1854] to prepare the site for the erection of the Winneshiek House, then building.”...
Between Webster City and Fort Dodge is the small community of Duncombe, the center of a region containing extensive gypsum deposits. The town was laid out in 1869 by the Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad Company, and within a short time a number of mining companies were...
At the northeast corner of Main and Lake streets is a classic example of what is often spoken of as “Carpenter's Gothic.” This Episcopal church (c. 1880) has the usual narrow corner entrance tower with a high spire; the body of the clapboard-sided church is covered by a...
At the south end of Main Street in Fertile is situated the Rhodes Mill (1868). The mill is located on the Winnebago River, which has been dammed to form a large mill pond. The mill was constructed as a flour mill, and it is still in use today for grinding food products. In...
Southeast of the town of Festina is what is referred to as “the smallest cathedral in the world,” another of Iowa's folk follies. The church is 14 feet wide and 20 feet long, with a 5-foot-square entrance tower. The walls of the church are of limestone rubble and the wood-...
Between Cresco and the Minnesota border town of Granger are the few buildings constituting the crossroads community of Florenceville. On the northern outskirts of Florenceville, just below the Minnesota border, one comes across the Granger Methodist Church of c. 1866...
The community is situated just south of Lime Creek. To the east there are extensively forested lands; to the west the landscape opens up onto a slightly undulating open prairie. The original plat of 18 blocks, laid out in 1856, left three blocks open for public use, one...
Fort Atkinson State Park includes a number of buildings, including Fort Atkinson ( NO131). Two blocks northwest of the fort is the romantic stone ruin of the Lutheran Chapel of Saint James German (c. 1857). In the town...
The military established a stockaded post at this site in 1850. The post was abandoned in 1853, and the following year the city of Fort Dodge was platted. This first plat was laid out on a grid that ran somewhat parallel to the east bank of the Des Moines River. Though a...
Situated within a landscaped square south of US 18 within Garner is the Hancock County Courthouse of 1899. F. W. Kenney of Minneapolis provided the county with a simplified, somewhat abstracted version of the Richardsonian Romanesque. Though the three-arched recessed entry...
Goodell, in southeast Hancock County, contains the remains of a Prairie school bank building (c. 1915). This small brick structure, now converted into a garage, has a composition of end pavilions whose presence is established by vertical paneling of different colors of...
The Burlington, Cedar Rapids, and Minnesota Railroad constructed a line through Floyd County in the late 1860s, essentially following the course of the Shell Rock River. In 1871 the town of Greene was laid out by the railroad, with sections of the town on both sides of the...
Grundy Center, just south of Blackhawk Creek, was first settled in 1855. In the following year the county was organized and Grundy Center became the county seat. The terrain in this section was described by Andreas as “high rolling prairie,”...
At 319 South Michigan Street, is a good-sized Craftsman house (c. 1912). The hipped gable end of this two-story dwelling faces the street; within this gable is a two-story porch with brick piers brought all the way up to the lintel on the second floor. The body of the...
Three miles below Humboldt, the Des Moines River divides into two branches. On the east fork of the river is Dakota City, the location of the Humboldt County Courthouse. Just west of Dakota City is Humboldt, situated on the west fork of the river. The community of Humboldt...
The city is located on a handsome site at a point where the Wapsipinicon River cuts through rolling hills, many of which were covered with oaks. The northsouth, east-west grid was laid out in 1847, first on the east side of the river and later on the west side. In the...
In 1904, the editors of the Atlas of the State of Iowawrote of the site of Iowa Falls, “The Iowa River, close at hand, with bold and rocky bluffs, cut perpendicularly down in places, deep and shady glens, with native timber and smooth prairie land not far distant...
In downtown Lake Mills there is a handsome two-story Richardsonian Romanesque commercial building (c. 1890) with a pair of polished granite columns that greet you at its entrance (south side of West Main Street, between Washington and Mill avenues). At the northeast...
Lakota owns one of Iowa's key monuments of the Streamline Moderne of the 1930s. This is its city hall (1940), designed by Thorwald Thorson, a Forest City architect who produced a number of buildings sponsored by the WPA and PWA during that decade. The Lakota City Hall could...
The Des Moines architectural firm of Wetherell and Gage in 1909–1910 provided the community of Laurens with a new Carnegie Public Library. For the design, the architects turned not to the Beaux-Arts Classical but to the informal and homelike Craftsman mode. The resulting...
The Lidke Mill (1857, 1917) is located 1 mile north of downtown on Willard Street. The stone mill building and its dam were constructed in 1857 on the Upper Iowa River. The mill was initially planned as a sawmill; late in 1860 it was converted to process flour. The...
Just off US 63 as it passes through Lourdes one will easily see the tall spire of the Roman Catholic Church of the Immaculate Conception (1901). The design of the church is that of a Gothic church loosely derived from small medieval French examples. It has an entrance tower...
The two-story brick Farmers State Bank building (1915–1916) at Lytton illustrates very clearly how close in many ways the imagery of the Beaux-Arts Classical tradition was to that of the Prairie style. The two street elevations of this building display a row of brick piers...
Ten miles north of Mason City on US 65 is the small community of Manly, situated within an open and fertile prairie. On Elmore Street, west of Broadway, is the two-story First State Bank building (c. 1915). The designer of this narrow, elegantly detailed building utilized a...
By the mid-1870s, Mason City had emerged as the principal city of north central Iowa. The site for the city was selected, as Andreas noted in 1875, for its “advantage of timber, building stone and good water,” and the town has also been “favored with excellent railroad...
Route 175 traverses the small town of Morrison. On the north side of the highway is a small clapboard-sheathed church (c. 1890) topped by a roof with hipped gable ends. The belfry of the square tower—almost a separate campanile—is housed within the church's steep roof,...
