Owatonna: The Jewel Box Town

Owatonna takes its name from the Dakota word for the Straight River, the waterway that drew settlers here in eighteen fifty-three. European Americans platted the town in the mid eighteen fifties and it became the seat of Steele County, named not for the metal but for Franklin Steele, an early Minneapolis settler. The town grew on milling and farming, mostly unremarkable.

Then in nineteen oh eight a local banker named Carl Bennett hired the great Chicago architect Louis Sullivan to design a new bank, and what Sullivan built was a revolution: a brick cube with enormous arched colored-glass windows and swirling terra-cotta ornament, compact and dazzling. Sullivan called designs like this his jewel boxes. The National Farmers Bank put a farming town of about six thousand on the architecture map and became a National Historic Landmark.

It still operates as a bank today.