Early in the last century a Minneapolis banker named Roy Quimby set out to open bunches of small-town banks across the state. He started modestly in 1912, moving his first bank into a vacated 1894 bank building in Waconia. In Cologne he renovated half a double-wide house.
In 1915 Roy found an architect bitten by the Greek Revival bug, and by 1916 had built eleven virtually identical bank buildings in Hamel, Marine-on-St. Croix, St. Louis Park, Frontenac, Chanhassen, Augusta, Long Siding, Skyberg, Tower, New Prairie, and St. Bonifacius.
Quimby’s intent was never established, but he sold a baker’s dozen of his banks to a gullible speculator in 1918 for a dime on the dollar, and the banks quickly proved to have been looted. The state banking commissioner stepped in and closed them.
Cleverly avoiding a court appearance, Roy died a few days before the 1919 trial of the gullible speculator, who was convicted of bank fraud and sent to Stillwater. The infant Fed did not swoop in to rescue unwitting small depositors, mostly farmers. It took the state’s receiver until 1927 to claw back seventy-five cents on the dollar for Frontenac folks. L.H. Savage of Lake City had 40 cents on deposit in 1919; he got dividend checks of 22, 4, 3, and 2 cents.
Hamel exists in name only as “Uptown Hamel, the Historic Downtown District of the City of Medina.” Chanhassen’s bank fell to rapid suburban expansion as well. The towns of Augusta, Long Siding, Skyberg and New Prairie have all but disappeared. But about half the Greek Revival bank buildings survive today in some form.
The Marine building alone houses a bank a century later. The now-vacant Frontenac bank gleams on the east side of Hwy 61. Saint Bonny’s former bank is now the town’s public library.
Part of a touching love story after WWII, the New Prairie bank was dismantled for its lumber and parts, recycled by Windy and Donna Peterson to build their dream home on the Terrace, MN mill pond. The bank’s leaded glass transoms made spectacular kitchen windows.
The St. Louis Park bank was razed before 1960, leaving a wound in local history that still bleeds. One stellar image survives, gloriously reminiscent of the Parthenon in Athens. Hyperbole? Maybe.
The bank would have made a perfect home for the St. Louis Park Historical Society, where I serve as a trustee. But the Society was not founded until 1969.
Some history dies in oblivion; some fairy tales never come true.
