Skyscraper on the Prairie: The Capitol That Rose from Fire

In the early hours of Sunday, December twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty, a janitor at the North Dakota State Capitol heard a loud cracking sound and found flames leaping from the Senate Chambers on the fourth floor. The blaze had likely started in a pile of oily rags left behind by workers who had been cleaning and varnishing legislators' desks before the upcoming session. Bismarck's two fire trucks responded quickly. They were not enough.

The capitol of eighteen eighty-three burned completely. Secretary of State Robert Byrne rescued one document from the safe: the original North Dakota Constitution. The rest was lost.

North Dakotans had mixed feelings about the loss. The old building had been cramped, outdated, and widely criticized. Many felt the fire was less a tragedy than an opportunity. The nineteen thirty-one legislature appropriated two million dollars for a replacement, a significant sum for a state in the grip of the Great Depression. To help pay for it, North Dakota sold half of the original capitol grounds.

For the design, they chose the Chicago firm of Holabird and Root, working with North Dakota architects DeRemer and Kurke. What they built was unlike any other state capitol in America. Instead of a dome, they designed a twenty-one-story Art Deco tower, two hundred forty-one feet tall, its vertical limestone lines rising from the flat prairie like something from a different century altogether. Construction began in nineteen thirty-two. The building opened in nineteen thirty-four.

The structure has been the tallest building in North Dakota ever since. Locals call it the Skyscraper on the Prairie. It remains one of the most unusual state capitols in the country, a Depression-era modernist statement rising from the plains with no dome and no apology.