Principia College Historic District

Principia College occupies limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River at Elsah, Illinois, and was planned as an English village that follows the hills. The college serves young Christian Scientists. Its plan began in the 1920s for a Missouri lakeside site, but the site was changed in 1930 to the Illinois bluffs. San Francisco architect Bernard Maybeck designed the campus buildings from 1931, working closely with college director Frederic Morgan. Henry Gutterson later completed many of the designs. Buildings combine brick, stone, half-timbering, concrete and tile roofs, with a Colonial-style chapel of Indiana limestone. The district includes 24 contributing buildings from 1931 to 1946, and later college buildings from the 1950s to the 1980s are counted as noncontributing. It is considered significant as the last major phase of Maybeck's career and for its concentration of his work, eleven of whose buildings survive here. The landscape plan was by Butler Sturtevant.