The town of Onawa was platted in 1857 some 5 miles east of the Missouri River. In the following year the community became the seat of Monona County. The Monona County Courthouse (1891–1892) is a picturesque rendition of the Richardsonian Romanesque, due largely to a varied...
Quite often in the settlement of Iowa towns the first public building constructed was a school building. Throughout the nineteenth century, town histories mentioned the school buildings within a community as proudly as the railroad stations, banks, and manufacturing...
O'Brien County was organized in 1860, and Primghar, which lies almost exactly in the center of the county, became the county seat. The present O'Brien County Courthouse, located at the junction of US 59 and route B40, is the third within Primghar. It is a particularly...
Rising thin and tall at the southwest corner of Third Avenue and Ninth Street is the Sheldon Bank building (1888). The walls of this two-story commercial block on a raised basement are of warmly colored but sharp and brittle quartzite laid in an irregular pattern. Exterior...
Sibley was the first town laid out in Osceola County. It was platted by the Sioux City and Saint Paul Railroad in 1872. Three blocks were set aside for public use: a courthouse square, a public park, and a site for a schoolhouse. The present brick-and-stone Osceola County...
Sidney, the seat of Fremont County, was established in 1851. Now occupying the southeast corner of Illinois and Filmore streets, at the courthouse square, is the Fremont County Courthouse (1889). The architect, S. E. Maxon, rendered the Richardsonian Romanesque in brick and...
Facing one another across the town's main street (US 75) are two small bank buildings, both of which have the quality of Beaux-Arts design as well as the many variations possible within this classical approach. Both of the banks were designed by the Saint Paul firm of...
The wide, deep Missouri River provided a natural transportation corridor for the northwestern section of Iowa. This region was a lush, rich prairie just waiting for cultivation and husbandry. Two of Iowa's cities sought to exploit the potential of the waterway and its...
This community, situated in the southwest corner of the state, 8 miles east of the Missouri River, contains a characteristic example of a Federal-style one-and-a-half-story dwelling. This is the Todd house of 1853, a clapboard house with a central chimney, located on Park...
Just south of I-80 in Pottawattamie County is the community of Walnut. The town presents a nearly perfect assemblage of buildings that have come to characterize our mental picture of a small Iowa agricultural town. Iowa 83 runs due south from I-80, and as it enters town and...
Idaho is a geographically diverse state whose resources, topography, and transportation networks have shaped its economic, urban, and architectural development. The northernmost area, the Panhandle, is a place of picturesque, mineral-laden mountain...
The built environment of Illinois has been shaped largely by transportation routes and the land itself. Rivers were the first drivers of civilization, with the largest prehistoric city in North America growing up around smaller and earlier settlements along the east bank of the Mississippi River...
Indiana’s landscape ranges from the forested hills of Southern Indiana to the open farmland of the northern counties, marked by the Ohio and Wabash river valleys and their numerous tributaries as well as the shore of Lake Michigan. Indiana’s cities vary widely in age and culture, from Vincennes,...
Kansas is a pivotal state. Sitting at the geographic center of the country, it typifies the American experience while also illustrating the uniqueness and diversity of the country’s various regions. Its built environment contains celebrated architectural masterpieces, but also displays a range of buildings...
The architectural history of Kentucky follows the trajectory of the country’s, from its Native-American prehistoric origins to the period of white settlement and the establishment of statehood in 1792, when the Greek Revival style became synonymous with nationhood. These parallels continue into the...
Buildings of Louisiana focuses on building forms unique to the state and shows others, such as plantation houses, in unexpected variety, including early houses influenced by Creole traditions and later ones that fit the columned Greek Revival image. Parlange in New Roads, Melrose...
Cradled in a curve of the Mississippi River and contained on the north by Lake Pontchartrain, New Orleans has fluid boundaries; like an island, the city can be approached only over water. Its elevation is ten feet above sea level next to the river and well below sea level in many...
Modern-day Gretna was formed from three nineteenth-century communities: Mechanikham, Gretna, and McDonoghville. Mechanikham, laid out in 1836 by Nicolas Destrehan from a plan by Benjamin Buisson, consisted of a common (now Huey P. Long Avenue) stretching southeast from the...
Avondale was home to one of the nation’s biggest shipbuilding facilities and was once the largest employer in Louisiana. Established in 1938 as Avondale Marine Ways, it later became a unit of Northrop Grumman Corporation, then Huntington Ingalls; it closed in 2014. In its...
This suburb of New Orleans experienced phenomenal growth in the mid-twentieth century, although the area was rural throughout most of its earlier history. Because of the swampy nature of the soil, the remnants of the alluvial Metairie Ridge became the locus of the town’s...
In 1894, the Illinois Central Railroad established railroad yards and a roundhouse at what is now the town of Harahan, which was incorporated in 1920 and named for James T. Harahan, a former president of the railroad. In 1915, Harahan was linked to New Orleans by...
Kenner (first known as Kennerville) extends across the former plantation lands of Minor Kenner and William B. Kenner (brothers of Duncan F. Kenner of Ashland Plantation upriver in Ascension Parish; see Day Trip 2...
In the neutral ground of Louisiana 46 (near Paris Road) are several brick piers, the sole remains of Versailles, the sixteen-room plantation house built in 1805 by Pierre Denis de la Ronde, destroyed by fire in 1876. Extending from the ruins toward the river is the allee of...
The Vieux Carré (old square), also known as the French Quarter or simply the Quarter, was designed in an eleven-by-six-block gridiron plan. A public square, the Place d’Armes (now Jackson Square), faces the river and dates from the colonial period as a military parade ground...
New Orleans’s rapid expansion in the late eighteenth century led to growth beyond the Vieux Carré across Rampart Street to Faubourg Tremé and downriver to Faubourg Marigny, Bywater, and Holy Cross. Tremé, bounded roughly by N. Rampart, Canal, and N. Broad streets and Esplanade Avenue...
Marigny, Bywater, and Holy Cross follow the Mississippi River as it flows downstream. Parallel to them on the lake side of St. Claude Avenue are the neighborhoods of St. Roch, St. Claude, and the Lower Ninth Ward. Marigny, bounded by Esplanade and St....
Esplanade Avenue’s closely spaced houses, tall and narrow with side halls, and often built up to their property line, give the street a distinctive and sophisticated urban character. By the 1850s, when the Vieux Carré was becoming shabby, Creoles—often free...
Canal Street, 171 feet wide, extends 3.5 miles from the Mississippi River to the cemeteries on Metairie Ridge. As the city’s premier commercial boulevard, lower Canal—the blocks that separate the Vieux Carré from the Central Business District (originally the Faubourg St. Mary...
