Converse County Bank

The County’s oldest surviving financial institution, Converse County Bank, first opened for business in this location in 1918. That portion of the structure visible from the exterior—the front façade—was designed and built with extraordinary care; by itself, it lends the building a weighty and vaguely impenetrable air, thereby counterbalancing the building’s relatively diminutive proportions. It looks, unto the present day, nothing so much as quite like a bank. This was an effect deliberately sought by the bank’s founders (amongst others, John M. Flynn and George H. Cross), who were faced with the task of converting an existing red-brick structure, built in 1910, which at the time was being used as a saloon. Buff-colored brick integrated with intricate, ceramic ornamentation was chosen for the new façade, undoubtedly to establish a complete visual disassociation from the building’s immediate past. To the same end, the entrance is bracketed by Classical-style pilasters crowned with scrolled capitals; pilasters of a similar character frame the two front windows. Finally, an elaborate, ornamental ceramic shield perches above the decorative cornice across the top of the façade. All in all, no visual trace remains to remind the potential customer of the building’s former use. By all accounts, the conversion proved a success: after one year in business, the new bank had attracted a total of $127,000 in customer deposits (or about $1,290,000 in today’s dollars). Currently, over eight decades later, the financial institution is still in business, although it long ago outgrew these original quarters on North 2nd Street.