“Buildings Have Soul”

Preservation Pioneer
William Wagner

By Carol Bodensteiner
Photos courtesy Dallas County Conservation Board

The Dallas Center Scale House was a small building — just two rooms built next to the railroad tracks in the 1880s and used to weigh grain wagons.

After decades of service, the building had outlived its usefulness. Technology had passed it by, and the owners of the grain elevator made plans to tear the building down. 

But William “Bill” Wagner could not bear to lose even this simple building.

“If it’s good architecture, if it’s pleasing, it should not be destroyed,” insisted Wagner, an architect who dedicated his life and career to historic preservation.

Following the path he’d pursued throughout his career, he rescued the Scale House, moved it to his rural home, and turned it into his own studio.

“I believe buildings have soul,” said Wagner, so he worked to save them.

“Bill believed buildings were more than the materials they were made of,” explains Jack Porter, a preservation consultant with the Iowa State Historical Society and a friend of Wagner’s.

“He believed a building embodies the spirit of the people who created the building materials and those who built the structure, as well as those who visited, lived, and worked there.”

“Bill was one of the first progenitors of architectural preservation,” says John Wetherell, retired architect and Wagner’s former partner at Wetherell, Harrison and Wagner. “He could look at a building and imagine what it had been, how it had changed.”

Seeing how a building changed was important to Wagner; he was interested in not only the architecture of buildings but also the stories behind the buildings. In the course of his career, Wagner, named a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, sketched over 360 of Iowa’s historical buildings in 70 Iowa counties.

(Read more Preservation Pioneer)