Photograph by Mid-west Photo Service (St. Paul, Minn.), Public domain. Via
Wikimedia Commons.
Adams County Courthouse
Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.
From the record
“The Adams County Courthouse is a three-story brick courthouse building in Hettinger, North Dakota. Built in 1928, it was designed by Ira Rush, an architect who won competitions for design of several other courthouses in the state.”
Wikipedia article Adams County Courthouse (North Dakota), CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of 3 National Register listings published here for Adams County · listed in 1985 · category: Building.
National Register reference number.85002977- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
Fires near this property
14 since 2005
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 14 fires within 5 miles of Adams County Courthouse
between 2005 and 2016, burning about 41 acres in total. 1 started naturally. None was recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Equipment and vehicle use
5
Railroad operations and maintenance
4
Natural
1
Smoking
1
Recreation and ceremony
1
Misuse of fire by a minor
1
Debris and open burning
1
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
Hettinger, the town this property stands in, in 64 storm reports between 1994 and 2025: 31 hail, 25 thunderstorm wind, 3 tornado, 2 lightning.
The reports record 3 injuries. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
Golfball to baseball size hail combined with 50 mph winds caused extensive damage to homes and vehicles. One hundred (100) vehicles at an automoble dealership sustained heavy damage. Two (2) persons were treated for minor cuts, abrasions and bruises at the Hettinger hospital as a result of the hail storm. A third person sustained minor cuts when the windows of her car were broken by the hail.
Extensive thunderstorm wind damage occurred in and around the city of Hettinger. About three miles west of Hettinger, multiple hopper-style grain bins blew over, damaging other grain bins nearby. About two miles south of Hettinger, a shop building was severely damage, with two of the four walls collapsed and the roof completely removed. Within the city of Hettinger, many campers and trailers were rolled onto their side, and multiple trees were down. Power lines were also down in various locations due to both the strong winds and trees falling on the lines.
This tornado formed just outside of the city of Hettinger, crossed Mirror Lake, where it picked up water, and came into the city on the south side. Tree branches were broken, windows were broken on an apartment building, and an automobile was damaged. The front passenger side of an automobile with two occupants was lifted off the ground a few inches and dropped back down. The occupants saw the narrow tornado spin up the street at them and then lift as it got overhead. They were shook up but no one was injured. Based on the damage done the tornado was rated low end EF1. From that it was determined that the wind speeds were around 90 mph.
Heavy rain over a few day period led to water running over some county roads. Newspaper articles indicated the water was not significantly deep. Low water was running across farm roads and fields.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
Listed places nearby
1 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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