Maverick Bank

Erected during the boom ignited by the founding of the town, the Maverick Bank was the first brick building in Douglas. Unlike its walking tour counterpart, the Converse County Bank, very little is recorded about the history of the Maverick firm. This may be owing to the fact that the bank survived as a bank for only a single year, and the building was subsequently devoted to other, multiple uses, including a post office and a watchmaker’s establishment (the latter being combined, oddly enough, with a candy shop). Future tenants included a wall paper supplier, a tobacconist, a paint supplier, an attorney, a restaurateur, a hardware supplier, and an insurance agent. Judging by the few available historic photos of the original bank, the south façade of the building (facing Center Street) originally terminated after the fifth of the eight windows that are currently evident along the level of the second floor; thus that portion of the building that contains the remaining three windows—and including, of course, the modern storefront along the ground floor beneath those windows—constitutes a later addition to the structure. Indeed, the entire exterior perimeter of the first floor bears almost no resemblance to the original building. The west façade, along 2nd Street, originally contained large, plate glass windows set within heavy and ornate wooden frames that extended to the ground; identical wood framing defined the main entrance, located within the canted wall that connects the south and west façades. Today, no trace remains of this elaborate, intricately-detailed carpentry, and the original brick exterior has been sheathed by a layer of painted stucco. Overall, then, the original Maverick building exhibited a character and stylistic integrity that is no longer in evidence—an unfortunate but common, and probably unavoidable, consequence of accommodating multifarious users across a span of more than a century.