1901 - (former) I.O.O.F. Building - Lancaster, Wisconsin - Dated Buildings and Cornerstones on Waymarking.com

Historic Name	Address	Date of Construction
I.O.O.F. Building	133 West Maple Street	1901
When the Independent Order of Odd Fellows built themselves a new lodge hall in 1901, they also built one of the district's most architecturally distinctive buildings and one whose exterior is almost totally intact today. The I.O.O. F. building is rectilinear in plan and three-stories-tall and its main facade faces south onto West Maple Street and is faced with brick. This symmetrically designed facade features a intact first story storefront that consists of two centered display windows that are flanked on either side by inset entrances that feature paired entrance doors to the store on the right-hand side and to the second story on the left. The upper stories are two-bays-wide and each bay is two-stories-tall and is inset slightly into the facade. These bays both have semi-circular-arched heads and they feature a triple window group in each of their two stories. These groups are separated from one another by a paneled brick spandrel that is positioned between them within the bay. The edges of these bays are trimmed with small sandstone blocks that have a quarried surface, and a dressed sandstone keystone of somewhat exaggerated proportions is centered in the arched head of each bay and forms part of the stringcourse above that serves as the base for the tall corbelled brick cornice that crowns the facade.
The design of this building is a sophisticated one that is almost certainly the product of a still unknown architect. Whoever designed it was aware of trends then prevailing in architectural styles, but combined them in a fashion that could only have occurred at the end of the Late Victorian era. Thus, the use of semi-circular-arched window heads and the trimming of the upper story's bays with rockfaced sandstone that contrasts with the otherwise smooth brick surface of the facade are both features that are sometimes associated with the Richardsonian Romanesque Revival style, but the placement of these bays within recessed and arched two-story bays and the use of various classically derived elements such as keystones can also be found on Beaux-Arts Classical style buildings of the same period.

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