Alvin Bushnell Bell House

Ida Grove, United States

Exterior only

Visible from the street; the inside is private.

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Located in Ida Grove, Iowa, the Alvin Bushnell Bell House is a 2½-story Queen Anne style residence completed in 1895. Designed by George Franklin Barber as one of his "mail order" houses and built by local craftsmen Thomas and William Bassett, the frame structure features a distinctive high hipped, cross-gabled roof and rich exterior ornamentation characteristic of the Queen Anne idiom. The house was commissioned by Alvin Bell, an Indiana native who moved to Ida County in 1880 and prospered in the livestock industry, eventually accumulating the 1,200-acre Bell Ranch by 1894. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1983, the house survives as an exceptional example of late-nineteenth-century pattern-book residential architecture adapted to the Iowa frontier.