Iowa jewel box bank 1
September 2, 2025 at 10:10 PM by Dr. Drang
With the Labor Day weekend behind me, I drove from Minnesota down into Algona, Iowa, to see the first of three Louis Sullivan jewel box banks in the Hawkeye State.
Strictly speaking, this isn’t—and never was—a bank. Wikipedia calls it the Henry Adams Building, and the plaque on the side calls it the Algona Land and Loan Office.
For much of its life, it was the home of the Druggists Mutual Insurance Company. It now contains the offices of the Algona Chamber of Commerce.
The pedestals with the pots are part of an entranceway that sits forward of the true front wall of the building. The terracotta squares at the two bottom corners are nicely detailed.
The windows on the long side of the building are decorated in a more geometric, less organic way.
A feature I especially liked is the decorative strip along the bottom of the wall.
According to the nice young woman working in the Chamber of Commerce office, virtually nothing of the interior—except maybe the tile floor, most of which is covered by carpeting—is original or even a restoration of the original, so I won’t show much of it. The front stained glass windows may be original,
and the stained glass windows along the side are apparently modeled on the originals.
This building is certainly a step below the palaces I saw in Columbus and Owatonna, but it still has some nice details. If a set of drawings exist somewhere, I’d like to see them to get a sense of what Sullivan intended for the interior.