Round Lake is almost entirely made up of gingerbread cottages designed in the Victorian Era. This was a style popular in America in the late nineteenth century, mostly among the emerging middle class. The Victorian Era is considered to range from 1837, when Queen Victoria I began her reign in England, to 1914. Several coinciding factors aided the explosion of Victorian architecture in the West, not least of all the completion of the transcontinental railroad, which allowed all manner of supplies to be transported back and forth across the states, an exhibition in Paris which brought many architectural influences to light for America, and most importantly, the explosion of the Industrial Revolution, which had been going on for several decades by this time.
Read the entire article in the May 8th issue of the Express.
