North Dakota State Building
Architect: Joseph L. Silsbee, Chicago, Illinois
Area: 3,604
Cost: $11,220
Picturesque World’s Fair, An Elaborate Collection of Colored Views—Published with the Endorsement and Approval of George R. Davis, 1894
THE NORTH DAKOTA BUILDING.—Supreme in one field., the people of North Dakota were evidently resolved to make that supremacy evident at the World’s Fair, and succeeded very well. Never were the immense agricultural resources of a state more gracefully or magnificently exploited. The building itself was a fine structure of staff, seventy by fifty feet in dimensions, two stories in height, and with a great piazza and portico. The legislature of North Dakota appropriated fifty thousand dollars for building and exhibits, but this sum was largely swelled by patriotic private citizens. The main feature of the structure was a big assembly hall with a great fireplace at either end. On either side of the main entrance were huge sheaves of wheat done in staff, and the walls of the interior were ingeniously and artistically decorated with nearly four hundred specimens of grasses arranged in curious designs. At one end of the main hall there was a mimic wheat field, the grass standing ready for the reaper and indicative of a heavy crop. Below this was the head of a horse done in grain and looking from a horseshoe. Elsewhere was the head of a bull made of wheat looking from a garland of the same grain. At one end of the main hall was a pyramid of spring wheat. including, what was certainly a surprise to most visitors, no less than one hundred and sixty varieties of the grain. The showing, taken altogether, was a splendid one for the new state.
North Dakota State Building
The North Dakota State Building is next on the left after one passes Nebraska. It is also in the colonial style of architecture, which seems to be particularly appropriate to the State buildings. It is dignified, though not severe ; home-like and hospitable, yet not trivial. In the North Dakota edifice the solid structure of the front elevation is essentially classic, with large exterior colonnades or porches carried up to cover two stories, a feature which is useful, and which, at the same time, softens and makes attractive the severer lines of the classic ideal. The ground-floor colonnade forms the porch, and the second story a gallery, doubly attractive by the fine situation of the building. The interior offers generous stairways and hall space, lighting and ventilation. The whole first floor is thrown into one room, 60 by 90 feet, affording ample room for display of the State exhibits, which include nearly every product of the soil found in the temperate zone, whether from field or forest, farm, garden or orchard.
A feature of this room is a large fireplace facing its main entrance, Hanked on either side by stairways
which meet at a landing, and, merging into one, give access to the second floor where are found reception, press and committee rooms, and toilet accommodation. The decorations of the building, both exterior and interior, are conventionalized representations of the natural and agricultural products of North Dakota. Wheat, corn, grasses of many kinds, etc., are shown in bas-relief on bands, panels and angles, while pedestals are occupied by allegorical figures and groups appropriate to the time and place. The material used for the structure is wood, covered with staff. The cost of the building was $11,000.
North Dakota State Building
[…] building came in under budget at $11,220. It was located on the northern tip of the fairgrounds between the Kansas and Nebraska buildings and across from Minnesota and Arkansas. A lithograph version of the impressive building was […]