One block of Main Street, building by building

c. 1885 – 1960

The district is one block long on each side of Main Street, and its core is the east side's two-storey row. The nomination's inventory, as carried in the district's standard summary, names: the Hoffman Block (c. 1885), among the block's two pre-1900 styled buildings; the Worster Building at 100 North Main (1892), built by contractor Henry B. Worster — who came to Liberty Township aged eight in 1854 and worked as a builder through the 1870s and 1880s — in Queen Anne form to house a general store, carried on as H. B. Worster and Son, and rated non-contributing in the nomination because of substantial alteration, its pressed-metal second-storey bay among the losses its entry records; the Finch Block (c. 1900); the Starr Grocery (c. 1911) and the North Liberty State Bank (c. 1911) at 119 and 125 North Main, built together as a two-storey block about 1911, the bank's house a Classical Revival building erected between 1909 and 1912 — absent from the 1909 Sanborn map, advertised in a 1912 newspaper, as the banked banks section works out whole; Town (City) Hall (1915); the L. W. Pommert Building (1920); the Masonic Hall (c. 1925); the Service Garage (c. 1935), the block's Art Moderne note; and the pair that close the period of significance, the Community State Bank and the Modern Speed Wash, both 1960.

The materials the nomination records are the small-town palette: brick walls, asphalt roofs, storefronts of aluminum and glass where the twentieth century rebuilt them, metal siding where it covered them. Two tellings of the Worster building's name circulate — "Worster" in the nomination and the town's own usage, "Worter" in the district's encyclopedia summary — and both print here, the nomination governing for the building's own history. What the inventory does not give is architects: with the exception of builders like Worster working on their own blocks, no architect is named for any building in the district in the carriers reached, and the architects-of-the-town item therefore stands as a named gap, its settlers the nomination's full inventory forms and the SHAARD entries behind them.