Preservation Iowa’s Most Endangered 2018: White House Bathing Palace, Le Mars, Plymouth County The White House Bathing Palace first appears on the 1907 Sanborn map as containing a public bath house. Primary customers were railroad passengers stopping in Le Mars, but with the spread of indoor plumbing, its use as a public bath house diminished…. Read more »
Preservation Iowa’s Most Endangered 2018: Jackson County Jail, Andrew (Jackson County) The Andrew Jail was constructed in 1871 of locally quarried Niagara limestone and is the only structural reminder that Andrew once served as the Jackson County seat (1841-1851 and 1861-1873). Even after the county seat moved to Maquoketa in 1873, the jail at Andrew… Read more »
Preservation Iowa’s Most Endangered 2018: Thomas D. Murphy Co., Red Oak (Montgomery County) The oldest section of this three-story brick factory was built in 1905 to house the world renowned Thomas D. Murphy Co., at one-time one of the nation’s largest makers of advertising art calendars. Designed by Omaha architect Harry Lawrie, the building was… Read more »
Preservation Iowa’s Most Endangered 2018: Dr. J.W. Smith Building, Charles City (Floyd County) The Dr. J.W. Smith Building at 201-203 N. Main was built in 1866 by Dr. Joel Washington Smith, one of the first physicians to move to what was then St. Charles and open a practice. For many years the building housed a… Read more »
Preservation at its Best 2017, Sustainability: Wonderbread Building / Single Speed Brewing (Waterloo) For those interested in the intersection of preservation and sustainability, it’s understood that Historic buildings contain a tremendous amount of embodied energy. For that reason, all historic preservation projects are sustainable. The Waterloo Wonder Bread building was built in 1928 and was… Read more »
2015 Preservation at its Best, Rural Preservation: Priester Building and Opera House Bloomfield has about 2600 residents and is the county seat of Davis County. A key defining characteristic of many rural communities is the courthouse square surrounded on all sides by small storefronts. Unfortunately, many communities have several missing buildings—even entire missing blocks–surrounding their… Read more »
