History
St. Charles, Illinois was first settled in 1833 and was incorporated as a city in 1874. In the early 1890s, it became apparent that the settlement needed a main government building from which to conduct affairs. Mayor A. H. Bennett commissioned the structure that year, authorizing the purchase of the property from B. T. Hunt for $1,500 in 1891. The St. Charles City Council approved the building on March 12, 1892, accepting a bid from local builder F. W. Alexander for $5,496. The building received its common name from the words "City Building" that were carved into the front of the structure. The building functioned as St. Charles city hall until 1941, and still housed police and fire services until 1962. The 16th Judicial Circuit Court also used the building in the 1950s and 1960s. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on March 21, 1979.
Read more about this topic: City Building
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Bias, point of view, furyare they ... so dangerous and must they be ironed out of history, the hills flattened and the contours leveled? The professors talk ... about passion and point of view in history as a Calvinist talks about sin in the bedroom.”
—Catherine Drinker Bowen (18971973)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (18031882)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by handa center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)