Crook County Bank Building, Prineville

The two-story stone building at the heart of Prineville tells you everything about what the people of central Oregon believed was coming in nineteen ten. They built in volcanic basalt quarried locally, honed into large rectangular blocks, in the Romanesque style , a design choice that said: this is a permanent institution, this community is here to stay, and prosperity is on its way.

The Crook County Bank Building opened in nineteen eleven and housed three successive banks over the next quarter century. The Crook County Bank occupied it first, followed by the Bank of Prineville when the original tenant departed in nineteen twenty-three, and finally the Prineville National Bank. The building was conceived as a symbol of a railroad future that had only recently arrived , the Oregon Trunk Railroad and the Deschutes Railroad both reached this part of central Oregon around nineteen eleven, opening up trade corridors that had previously required brutal wagon hauls across the high desert plateau.

Prineville, the seat of Crook County, had been founded in the eighteen seventies in a land of cattle ranches and juniper breaks, a long way from anywhere. The optimism that produced a bank in a Romanesque style building reflected genuine economic ambition , the same ambition that was opening irrigation projects and dreaming of transforming the arid plateau into farmland.

The Depression ended that run of confidence. The Prineville National Bank failed in the nineteen thirties. The building was purchased by A. R. Bowman for his title and insurance business, which he ran from the premises until his death in nineteen seventy. Crook County acquired the property in nineteen seventy-one and converted it to the A. R. Bowman Memorial Museum , the local history museum it remains today.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-one. The volcanic basalt blocks still carry the aspirations of a town that thought it was about to become much bigger than it turned out to be.