Skyscraper on the Prairie: The Capitol That Rose from the Ashes

On the morning of December twenty-eighth, nineteen thirty, a worker cleaning the top floor of the North Dakota State Capitol knocked over a pile of oily rags near a janitor's closet. The rags were there because crews had been polishing legislators' desks in preparation for the upcoming session. Within hours, the building that had served as North Dakota's seat of government since eighteen eighty-three was gone. Thousands of residents stood in the bitter December cold and watched it burn.

The timing could not have been worse. The stock market had crashed fourteen months earlier. North Dakota's wheat farmers, already struggling before the Depression, were watching prices collapse to levels that barely covered seed costs. The state treasury had little room for a major capital expenditure. And yet the legislature, gathering in emergency session, did something decisive: they appropriated two million dollars for a new building and gave the architects a single, clear instruction. Make it modern.

The firm they hired, in collaboration with North Dakota architects Joseph DeRemer and William Kurke, was Holabird and Root of Chicago, the firm that had defined Art Deco commercial architecture in the nineteen twenties with buildings like the Chicago Board of Trade and the Palmolive Building. What Holabird and Root designed for Bismarck was not a traditional domed statehouse. It was a twenty-one-story tower clad in Indiana limestone, its facade stripped of ornament, its massing a clean vertical shaft rising two hundred forty-one feet from the flat Missouri River plain.

When it was completed in nineteen thirty-four, it was one of the first government office buildings in the country built as a skyscraper rather than a monument. It remains the tallest building in North Dakota, which means that you can see the seat of state government from almost anywhere on the surrounding prairie, a capitol that does not hide behind a dome but announces itself as a tower of administration in the middle of a wheat field.

The final cost came in exactly one million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, six hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars under budget, in the depths of the Great Depression.