Historic Main Street
Near Stillwater, Minnesota
The brick and stone storefronts lining Main Street are not a reconstruction. They are the real thing, the commercial heart of a lumber boomtown that never got torn down and rebuilt. Downtown Stillwater is protected as a Commercial Historic District on the National Register of Historic Places, taking in about eleven blocks and more than sixty contributing buildings, most of them raised between the eighteen sixties and the early twentieth century when timber money flowed through this valley.
Wander the sidewalks and you can read the prosperity in the architecture, the tall Italianate windows, the ornate cornices, the solid limestone walls built to last. One block west of Main stands the Lowell Inn, opened in nineteen twenty seven as a grand destination hotel, its columned front earning it the nickname the Mount Vernon of the West, with thirteen pillars said to honor the thirteen original colonies. Because the lumber boom faded before the wrecking ball fashions of later decades, Stillwater kept a downtown that many bigger cities lost.
Today it draws visitors from across the region who come to browse the shops, eat along the river, and walk through a Main Street that still looks much as it did a century ago.
