A man who changed the world of architecture got his start here in Minnesota.

Cass Gilbert was a struggling St. Paul architect when he designed the White Bear Town Hall in 1885. Township records didn’t even mention his name.

“They didn’t feel his name meant anything at that point,” Sara Markoe Hanson, executive director of the White Bear Lake Area Historical Society, said. “Decades later, it did.”

A decade after the town hall, Gilbert went on to greatness. Gilbert designed the Minnesota State Capitol. Gilbert moved to New York City, where he designed the Woolworth Building, the world’s tallest skyscraper, in 1913.

He designed buildings on college campuses, churches, museums, train stations, and the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C.

Gilbert died in 1934 at the age of 74.

“Ultimately, he was intense,” Hanson said. “He owned every inch of every project.”

When the township moved out of the White Bear Town Hall in 2011, its future looked bleak.

“There was a conversation about demolition,” Hanson said. “Let’s decommission it, do some ceremony to honor it, and demolish it. I went a little goofy and said we can’t do that.”

In 2015, the White Bear Lake Area Historical Society helped save the building and moved it to Polar Lakes Park.