Sherman Hill Historic District in Des Moines, Iowa, spreads out ahead of you. This is one of the city's oldest residential neighborhoods, an 80-acre sweep of 210 buildings that has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1979. Single-family houses began to rise here around 1880, and between 1900 and 1920 multi-family dwellings joined the streets, so you are walking where decades of growth layered house upon house.
The neighborhood name itself was borrowed in the early 1970s from Hoyt Sherman Place, the brick "palazzo" a Des Moines banker built on this hill in the early 1870s; that house and the hill set the tone. Developers such as Talmadge Brown, James Savery and W.C. Burton followed, laying out streets and lots in the first of seven subdivisions that now make up this district. Over roughly forty years you can spot the full range of domestic architecture mentioned in the records: late Victorian mansions, simple hipped-box houses, gable-roofed vernacular dwellings and small cottages.
This district's seven subdivisions stretch from 15th Street on the east to Martin Luther King Parkway on the west, bounded by High Street to the south and School Street to the north.