Minnesota jewel box bank
August 28, 2025 at 10:02 PM by Dr. Drang
Today’s Louis Sullivan jewel box bank is the National Farmers’ Bank in Owatonna, Minnesota. I stopped here on the way up to the Twin Cities, where I’ll be visiting my daughter and going to the Minnesota State Fair.
This bank was designed and built about a decade before the one I saw yesterday in Columbus, Wisconsin. That one was the last jewel box Sullivan designed; this is the first one. The park across the street from the bank has sign with a brief history of the building.
The semicircular stained glass windows are similar to what we saw in Columbus, Wisconsin, but here there are two large windows on adjacent sides of the building.1 The exterior as a whole is more ornate, largely because of the color used in the terracotta pieces.
Inside, the large semicircles are repeated on the other sides of the building, but these are filled with murals instead of windows.
You can see part of the other mural behind the clock that faces you as you walk in the front door. The clock is above the teller area; there’s a mezzanine behind it.
From the mezzanine is great view of the front stained glass window, the enormous hanging light fixtures, and the decorative piece above the entrance.
A “B” motif can be found in many of the decorative elements. They’re a nod to the bank’s president, Carl Bennett, who commissioned Sullivan at a time when he was having trouble getting work.
In an hallway above and behind the mezzanine, a few of Sullivan’s blueprints have been laminated and mounted on the walls.
As before, I got a closeup of the title block.
Also, there’s a wonderful detail of the floor slab. While reinforced concrete had been used well before this building, it still wasn’t especially common. What I like about this detail is that it isn’t very detailed. The theory of reinforced concrete was in its infancy, but Sullivan did seem to know that he needed top reinforcement in the negative moment areas.
If things go according to plan, I’ll be visiting the three jewel box banks in Iowa next week.
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There are several other semicircular windows on the longer side of the building, but they’re not made of stained glass. ↩