Designs stand the test of time
By Steven P. Wagner
The Forum - 12/12/1999

Their works serve as icons of the Red River Valley, but many of their names have been long forgotten.

History books describe the homes, business centers and public buildings they designed and built.

But there are few words about the men who designed the buildings that became as significant in the city as the people who inhabited them.

"Architecture is used so often (to record history), but no one seems to care where the buildings came from," said Ron Ramsay, an architectural historian and associate professor at North Dakota State University. He has made it his life's work to research and record the influences, trends and work of Great Plains architects.

North Dakota settlement was a fairly orderly progression from east to west along the Northern Pacific and Great Northern railroads. The progression of design style in North Dakota also was fairly orderly, following trends in education and national design styles.

Ramsay and five others produced the 1975 book "Fargo-Moorhead: A Guide to Historic Architecture," which states: "The kinds of buildings and their construction; the way they relate to one another and to the earth; and their 'style' all have something to tell us about ourselves."

Transformation in style

Ramsay said many of the early architects reflect a trend in styles and within the profession.

Charles Daniels was a self-taught architect, while George Hancock presumably had some architecture background from his days in England, Ramsay said.

Walter Hancock received a formal education at one of the nation's first architecture programs and Joseph Rossati's background was based primarily on academic, not practical, experience.

"We see the transition of architecture as a trade to a profession," Ramsay said. "They really represent what the profession was going through nationally."

Area architects in the Red River Valley had a common thread. "Nearly everyone who called himself an architect had come from somewhere else," Ramsay said.

That trend changed though, partly because of the prominent professionals who had come to stay, and partly because of the architectural carpetbaggers trying to cash in on the need for more buildings across the state.

In 1914, NDSU instituted its own architecture program. George and Walter Hancock helped pass a 1917 law requiring licensure of architects in North Dakota. George Hancock became the first licensed architect in the state; his brother was the second.

The result was a shift from importing design professionals to exporting them.

The Hancock Brothers

George Hancock came to Fargo in 1882, bringing his younger brother Walter with him. The Hancock brothers - George was 33 and Walter about 16 or 17 - came to the area after migrating to the United States from England.

In the 18th century, settlers traveled West to find new homes and work.

"The Great Plains was waiting for people to come out here," Ramsay said. "They needed buildings. People could come and claim what they wanted to be.

"Undoubtedly, that is why (George) Hancock came here. This was an area that needed a massive amount of construction."

George Hancock opened his architecture firm in Fargo as Walter traveled to Syracuse University - only one of a handful of public institutions offering an architectural degree at the time - to study. There was a stark contrast in their work and education, but together the two men designed a large share of the buildings of influence in Fargo.

"George's work, because he was English and older, was more blatantly Victorian," Ramsay said. His work reflected the tall, elaborately-adorned and vertically-inclined features of that style.

That contrasted to Walter's architectural preference.

While in New York, Walter Hancock became familiar with the Richardsonian Romanesque architectural style. The style became popular on the East Coast and featured rounded forms, compact buildings built lower to the ground, and used fewer building materials.

"(Walter) had been East and seen this new phenomenon," Ramsay said. "Almost immediately, the direction of their work changes."

One noticeable example of this style was the Hancock-designed Old Main on the NDSU campus.

Architects readily came and left the area throughout the 1870s and 1880s, and an economic boom from 1879 to 1884 probably helped entice the Hancocks to Fargo.

But by 1886 and 1887, blizzards and drought plagued the semi-arid plains of western Minnesota and North Dakota. The real estate market bottomed out, but unlike many nomadic architects, the Hancocks stayed in the area.

The brothers opened a branch office in Bozeman, Mont., a common practice for firms at the time. Pending statehood for North Dakota in 1889 may have prompted the brothers to stay longer than they had planned.

"I think they were intent on moving to Montana and closing the Fargo office," Ramsay said. "Then two things happened. The panic of 1895 and the bottom dropped out of the silver market and there was no economy in Montana."

A fire in 1893 wiped out most of Fargo stretching along Broadway from NP Avenue to Fifth Avenue North. Most of the buildings before the fire were constructed of wood. Afterwards, Fargo city leaders adopted building codes, which resulted in most buildings being constructed of brick.

"So much of it was built in a short amount of time that it was cohesive," Ramsay said. "There's this massive rebuilding and the one thing that is unique is the buildings are fairly uniform in style and materials and scale."

While carpetbagging architects converged on the city to cash in on a disaster, George and Walter Hancock still designed half of the buildings during the reconstruction of downtown.

Charles Daniels

Daniels, born about 1830 in New York, eventually made his way to Fargo. His Masonic Lodge membership played an important role in finding buildings to design.

Daniels began as a cabinet maker in New York and his way to the Minneapolis area as a contractor before moving to Faribault, Minn.

In Faribault, he was listed as an architect and contractor. In 1879, he moved to Fargo and worked primarily as an architect until 1884, when he moved to Washington and became an insurance agent. His stay in Fargo coincided with the region's economic boom.

"He goes from someone who builds fragments of buildings to constructing buildings to designing buildings to insuring buildings," Ramsay said. "Everyone one of those changes came during a geographical move."

While he only spent five years in the area, Daniels had some impressive work. He designed the Masonic Lodge, now the Dakota Business College on Eighth Street South in Fargo. He also designed lodges in Fergus Falls, Minn., and Casselton, N.D., and used his lodge membership to find work in Crookston, Minn.

M.E. Beebe

Milton Earl Beebe was a successful architect in Buffalo, N.Y., when he moved to Fargo. Beebe, already in his 50s, arrived in Fargo in 1898.

Although he had built a reputation for himself in Buffalo, that was quickly damaged when a building he designed cracked after it was built on soft soil. He had also failed to win a mayoral bid against Grover Cleveland, who went on to become a U.S. president.

Despite those two setbacks, it appears Beebe came to Fargo for other reasons, Ramsay said.

"The thing that seemed to draw him here was that Fargo was the divorce capital of the world," Ramsay said. "He came here to get a quicky divorce. He ran away from home. He abandoned his wife and practice."

Once here, Beebe divorced his longtime wife and remarried. His practice flourished and he designed some notable buildings in the area, including the South Engineering building on the NDSU campus, Old Main on the Concordia Campus and the house that is now home to Solberg Law Office, 1129 5th Ave. S., Fargo.

"He was quite prolific here and tended to work in classic styles," Ramsay said. "If it has big white columns, the chances are that he (designed) it."

He also designed the north wing of the original North Dakota State Capital. George Hancock designed the south wing of that building.

Beebe retired about 1911, and then moved to San Diego with his second wife.

Joseph E. Rossati

Rossati was born on Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 1889, and eventually graduated from the University of Michigan in 1915.

His education played an important role in his designs. The Michigan program had strong connections to two prominent Chicago architects: Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. Those two architects marked a progressive movement in architectural design.

Ramsay said history is unclear why Rossati moved to Fargo, but he formed a partnership with Ole Braseth.

"Rossati did one heck of a lot of work for the Catholic diocese," Ramsay said.

The Michigan-born architect's designs included St. Mary's school in Fargo, Roosevelt Elementary and the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house. He also designed several houses along Fargo's Eight Street South.

The profession grows

Between World War I and World War II, three architects dominated the design scene in the F-M area.

Rosatti, along with Marius Houkum and William Kurke, designed the bulk of memorable buildings and homes.

Houkum, a devout Lutheran, claims to have designed 125 churches in the Red River Valley. He also designed the Island Park swimming pool - a Works Progress Administration project to put carpenters to work during the Great Depression - in the 1930s.

Ramsay interviewed Houkum when the professor arrived in Fargo to teach. During the interview, Houkum said he was trained to design buildings efficiently and economically, but the Island Park pool presented a unique challenge.

"Along comes the Depression, and (Houkum) said he had to develop a new criteria," Ramsay said. "The criteria wasn't to build cheaply, the criteria was to put people to work."

The result was buildings constructed from a hybrid of materials, he said.

Kurke, who was Catholic, designed several churches, too, along with what is now the Edgewood golf course.

"I think what you find, like in many parts of the country, is specialization," Ramsay said.

As many longtime architects retired after World War II, Kurke's office became the training ground for the next generation, Ramsay said. The firm Mutschler, Twichell and Lynch sprouted from Kurke's office. "They did a lot of nice residential work," Ramsay said.

By the 1970s, the firm Foss, Engelstad and Foss was the major architectural firm in Fargo.

"The trend in the 1970s was for architectural firms to be big," Ramsay said. "They presented a corporate image of total design service. It was one-stop shopping."

But firms around the country once again became specialized in the 1980s as the economy bottomed out, Ramsay said. The result was not a reduction in architects; instead, there were more firms with smaller staffs.

In the 1970s, designers began focusing on preserving historic buildings. That trend has continued to the present day.

"Old buildings were in the way of new construction (in the 1960s)," Ramsay said. "But now there are architectural firms who specifically advertise their expertise in historic preservation.

"We came from the lusty seventies to now when architects are in the forefront of preservation."

Buildings are now viewed as cultural artifacts used to understand history and economic resources, he said.

"If we are creative, we could see there is a huge, untapped resource in redundant buildings" like railroad depots and hotels, Ramsay said. "We no longer look at old buildings as eyesores."

Instead, they represent a culture and trends in society that define not only the Red River Valley, but the nation.