More exceptional than the train station and grain elevators or the Deaf Smith County Courthouse is a line of houses on W. 3rd Street, all constructed of wood and encrusted with stickwork detailing doubtless ordered from catalogs and shipped by rail. The street is anchored at 508 W. 3rd by the E. B. Black House (1909, Emmett Vanderburgh), vestigially Queen Anne in its asymmetrical, picturesque massing. It is joined by undocumented houses at numbers 340, 400, and 401, which collectively and

surprisingly appear as a late-nineteenth-century neighborhood in a town founded in 1899, when picturesque conceptions of design in the United States were giving way to more formal models.