As the stories of rich land and the lure of the frontier brought more people to this region, small towns grew up on the prairie, most of them consisting of one business street and a few residential streets. Along the wooden sidewalks of Main Street the false-front building predominated, its frame facade rising a half story or more above its roof. The motive for constructing the false-front building may have been to provide space for a sign, or it may have been merely to "put on front" literally as well as figuratively. Often the sole brick building in the young North Dakota town housed the bank, and the hotel could be easily identified by its porches. Near the railroad track was the long gable roof depot of dark red, dark green, or yellow trimmed in red. The school was a boxlike white frame structure topped with a bell tower, and every town had at least one rectangular, white, gable roof church with windows in either side and a steeple and bell on the entrance facade. Residences varied from tar-paper shanties to the ornate, gabled, towered mansion of the eighties. Dominating the silhouette of these little villages were the grain elevators, those bright sentinels which symbolized the reason for the towns' founding, and still remain the most typical buildings in the North Dakota picture today. Like tall men standing head and shoulders above a crowd, they rise 60 to 70 feet above the low prairie. First glimpsed as any town comes into sight is the row of wedge-shaped cupolas, like arrowheads in profile, topping the almost square red, green, or maroon shafts. On the side opposite the railroad track, along which the elevators are lined, each building has its one-story scalehouse, where the trucks and wagons dump their loads of grain. A few feet from the scalehouse is the small rectangular power house and office building. As towns have prospered, brick buildings have come into use in the business sections, and new homes of bungalow, Colonial, old English, Spanish, and other modified styles have been built. Leaving behind the era of metal fronts, towers, and domes, public buildings are emerging in neoclassic, Gothic, Colonial, and modern architecture. The little white churches have given way in many instances to stone and brick structures varying in design from Gothic to modern, the United Lutheran Church in Grand Forks being an example of the latter. The schools have shown perhaps the greatest development of any type of building, and most towns now have well-designed modern schools which often serve as community centers.