Downtown Devils Lake Historic District

Downtown Devils Lake Historic District. . , Forty-seven downtown properties comprise the Devils Lake Commercial District, a. U.S. National Park Service recognized historic district, listed in the National Register of Historic Places, this nation's official list of historically significant properties., Devils Lake was established by Heber M. Creel in 1882, and secured a connection to James J. Hill's Great Northern Railroad line to Minneapolis. The area "boomed" as American, Canadian and European immigrants poured into the area and established an economy based largely on agriculture. The boom was triggered by the fortuitous combination of free (or inexpensive) farm land, the development of new strains of spring wheat especially suited to the area's climate and the particular demands of flour millers, and the opening of rail transportation to the Minneapolis flour mills., The sixty-five wood-frame buildings which comprised the first commercial district were destroyed by fire in 1884. After the fire, new commercial buildings were required to have brick and stone exteriors. The buildings that make up the current historic district were built between 1885 and 1937. Six of the properties survive from the pre-1900 period, including the Independent Order of Odd Fellows (I.O.O.F.) Building (1885), which is the oldest in the district. Most of the properties were built during the Second Dakota Boom (1900-1915) and the post-boom period (1916-1937). Major historic influences for these later periods include a second influx of immigrants after the opening of parts of the Fort Totten Indian Reservation to private land acquisition in 1904, the growth of Devils Lake as a commercial center and railroad hub, and the adoption of automobiles for local transportation., Although the properties in the district are primarily two-story brick and stone buildings, a variety of architectural styles are represented. Attention to stylistic details and adherence to common architectural themes were outweighed by the urgency of assuring functional and fire-resistant commercial buildings. The most common building material was brick from the Red River Valley Brick Company of Grand Forks. Consequently, the Devils Lake Commercial District demonstrated the melding of popular eastern design trends with the functional needs of a boom town economy, expressed in locally available materials.