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,N <br />Downtown Elk River, Minnesota <br />Phase II Historic Resources Inventory <br />April 2002 <br />Draft <br />-_t <br />Main Street from Quincy Street, looking southeast to Jackson Street, ca. 1910. The Oddfellows Block at <br />middle left is no longer standing, but many of the other buildings in this photo remain. SCHS photo. <br />Summary of Findings <br />Elk River seems to be peculiarly unfortunate in the matter of fires for a town of its size, <br />for besides three disastrous conflagrations in recent years it has in the course of its <br />history lost by fire two flouring mills, two or three saw mills, planing factory and <br />adjacent machine shop, two large stores and several smaller ones at upper town, a brick <br />school house and numerous residences. <br />Sherburne County Star News clipping, ca. 1902. <br />Elk River's commercial architecture over the past 150 years has been of generally simple <br />and utilitarian character. The first small stores built by Ard Godfrey and others in the <br />1850s were of frame construction, with gable roofs and flat trim. By 1900, several two- <br />story brick blocks housed banks, stores, and offices. <br />Several fires between 1887 and 1914 destroyed the record of much of Elk River's <br />nineteenth-century commercial architecture. The'Romdenne Block (now Sunshine <br />Depot) appears to the earliest survivor of Main Street, but its later neighbors such as the <br />W.H. Houlton Block (1906) and the Bank of Elk River (1915) are also local landmarks. <br />All have had exterior modernizations, but a fair amount of historic fabric probably <br />survives behind the changes. <br />