North Dakota

Standing Rock Community High School may seem culturally out of place on the Standing Rock Reservation of the Hunkpapa Lakota, Blackfeet, and Yanktonai Oyate nation that comprises the whole of Sioux County. It was designed according to an open-plan concept arrived at by the tribal building committee and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials in consultation with the architects.

The new Four Bears Bridge is a culturally important feature with a long history. Three earlier bridges crossing the Missouri River have been demolished or relocated. The first was the Liberty Memorial Bridge between Bismarck and Mandan, a truss bridge that was demolished in 2009. The second river-crossing bridge, built in 1927 and demolished in 1955, was the Verendrye Bridge located in the village of Sanish, about four miles upriver from the New Town area.

The older section of the University of North Dakota campus that lies to the east between N. Columbia Road and English Coulee is a unified complex with extensive landscaping, planned open spaces, and historically important relationships between the buildings. English Coulee flows through the campus and has been a unifying natural feature since the university’s founding. The campus was reached by streetcar service from 1904 through the 1930s. Most buildings are of red brick with limestone trim and are mainly in variations of Collegiate Gothic.

This Renaissance Revival building, with its repetitive grand-order Ionic columns, balustraded parapet, and Indiana limestone exterior, originally contained post office functions, but now serves only judicial purposes. In the late 1980s there was an initiative to construct a new federal courts facility that would have eviscerated two or more blocks of N. Broadway commercial frontage. Instead a new judicial wing, named for North Dakota’s U.S. senator Quentin N. Burdick, was added to the existing building.

Platted c. 1877, Island Park was a gift to the city from the Northern Pacific Railway. It is one of Fargo’s most historically important public open spaces. The site was subject to frequent flooding until the course of the Red River was altered by construction of an earthen levee that is popular for sledding in the winter. Local businesspeople commissioned the construction of a bandstand (2010 restored) that, today, is used more for outdoor weddings than for musical performances.

Rapson’s design for the Fargo City Hall and Civic Center Auditorium complex was Fargo’s first urban renewal initiative. Over time,

Minneapolis architects George W. Orff and Edgar E. Joralemon were among several out-of-town firms that established temporary offices in Fargo immediately after the Great Fargo Fire of 1893. Occasionally collaborating with Leroy S. Buffington, the work of Orff and Joralemon is especially distinguished. Erected as part of Fargo’s rebuilding after the 1893 fire, the International Order of Odd Fellows (IOOF) Hall was placed on the second floor, above the first-floor stores. In 1915–1916, a third story was added and the upper stories were converted to the Hotel Donaldson.

A significant modern-day investment by the State Historical Society in interpreting heritage, the center opened in August 2003. It tells the story of the confluence of these two rivers, as well as providing the same magnificent view experienced here by members of Lewis and Clark’s expedition in 1805 and 1806. Inside the circular building, three large murals feature quotations from the journals of Lewis and Clark as well as paintings of the Missouri River landscape by Colonel Philippe Régis de Trobriand, commanding officer of Fort Stevenson near present-day Garrison in the late 1860s.

Established in 1866 near the confluence of the Yellowstone and Missouri rivers, Fort Buford consisted of log and adobe quarters enclosed within a rough stockade of cottonwood logs. Materials for the post were obtained from the abandoned fur trading post at nearby Fort Union (WI7). Fort Buford was one of a chain of military posts extending from Fort Leavenworth to the Columbia River. Initially, it was designed to police the fur traders who had been illegally trading ammunition and whiskey to hostile Native Americans in the area.

Fort Union Trading Post was considered the most important and most elaborately furnished of all the Upper Missouri River posts. It was a primary post for trading fur and skins, from beaver pelts to buffalo hide. In addition, the fort attracted attention from artists, scientists, government surveying teams, miners, and West Coast-bound emigrants. The post, built by John Jacob Astor for his American Fur Company, became a primary meeting place for Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Arikara, Sioux, Plains Cree, and Crow Indians.