Sometime later this month, the State Historical Society of North Dakota is going to officially announce the approval of a new historic neighborhood in Bismarck. I’m pretty excited about it because I live in it.

Two years ago last week, the Highland Acres neighborhood in west Bismarck was named to the National Register of Historic Places, with its official new name, the Highland Acres National Historic District. There’s a little wing on the east edge of Highland Acres called Torrance Addition to the city of Bismarck, created in 1957, 10 years after the creation of Highland Acres. It’s just one long, curving street on the hillside that used to be Ell Torrance’s horse pasture. It covers about 40 acres and is home to 20 houses, all built in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as construction of the last of the more than 400 homes in Highland Acres was coming to a close.

I was part of the effort to get historic designation for Highland Acres. I live in Torrance Addition, just next door, and wanted my street to be part of it. When our group of local volunteers ran out of steam, we got a grant from the State Historical Society and hired a consultant to complete the application for Highland Acres. It’s no small process. It involves photos and a narrative for each house to be included in the district.

The consultants did a great job, and the result was approval by the state and federal governments. But the State Historical Society ran short of money, and so Torrance Addition was not included in the National Historic District.

Not to be deterred, those of us who lives on Arthur Drive set about to fix that. Using volunteers, we completed an application to become part of the district. Nearly two years later, early this spring, the State Historical Society approved our application and sent it on to the National Park Service, which has final say in these things.

This past week, I received an e-mail from Lorna Meidinger, the preservationist over in the Heritage Center, which said, “I heard from our reviewer before the holiday and she requested a couple of small revisions. I was able to make those by the deadline she gave me, so she signed the nomination and I received notice of listing Monday. Congratulations! I will be sending out formal notifications to all owners in our mail tomorrow and then I will send out a press release a few days later once it gets through editing. Attached is the final accepted version of the nomination.”

We’re in! The 20 houses on Arthur Drive, just west of the sixth teebox at Tom O’Leary Golf Course, is officially part of the Highland Acres National Historic District!

OK, I’m more excited than anyone else reading this, but it’s a pretty elite designation. We’re one of just three such districts in Bismarck, joining the Cathedral Area National Historic District and the Downtown Bismarck National Historic District.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a History of Highland Acres, which I published on my blog. This year, as part of the application process, I wrote another history, this one of Torrance Addition. I’ll share it with you here. A shorter version provided the basis for our successful application.

THE HISTORY OF THE TORRANCE ADDITION TO THE CITY OF BISMARCK

Torrance Addition to the City of Bismarck is a small neighborhood, with all but one of the homes sharing addresses on Arthur Drive. It was developed close on the heels of Highland Acres First Addition, on adjacent land, and so it was also a logical geographic extension of that post-war development meant to provide homes to returning service members.

The construction of the 20 homes in the addition took place simultaneous to the construction of the second wave of homes in Highland Acres. From the onset of Highland Acres construction, the homes along the east side of Crescent Lane, the easternmost street in Highland Acres, had backyards facing a large open pasture of nearly 40 acres, with just one house atop the hill, owned by longtime Bismarck resident and businessman Ell Torrance. Across Ward Road to the east of the Torrance land was Bismarck Municipal Golf Course, so the area had a park-like atmosphere. Torrance’s children used the land as a pasture for their horses.

Although there was some semblance of rural privacy on the property, the new home construction in Highland Acres brought increasing traffic to Ward Road and Avenue C, the two streets abutting Torrance’s property.

Seeing the success of Irv Wilhite and Art Seay in developing the land behind him, Torrance decided it was time to get on the housing bandwagon. He carved out a parcel that eventually became a cul de sac on the south end of his property, where his own house was located, and named it Torrance Hill Addition, filing a plat with the city. The rest of the property he divided into 21 parcels, the size of residential lots, along both sides of a long winding street to the bottom of the hill, much like the layout in the rest of Highland Acres, and called it simply “Torrance Addition.”

Torrance filed his plat with the city of Bismarck on April 5, 1957, and a number of homes were built in 1958 and 1959. The last home was completed in 1973. The lots were sold to individual buyers and they hired contractors to build the homes. Torrance attached strict covenants to the lots, similar to those in Highland Acres. The only major difference is that he required 25-foot frontyard setbacks, as opposed to 30 feet in Highland Acres. As a result, the houses are single-family, single-story, much like those in the remainder of Highland Acres.

The locale reflects an even distribution of residences in a close-knit setting and has an overall feeling of continuity and association. Some changes have taken place, but the overall house designs, workmanship and vegetation are still contemporary with the historic period.

From their backyards, residents on the south side of the street look down over the rooftops of the houses on Crescent Lane into the city parkland of Jackman Coulee, where many of the neighborhood kids spend their summer days, playing along the creek, and their after-school hours in winter sledding down the steep hill into the coulee.

Backyards of the houses on the north side of the street look out over Tom O’Leary Golf Course, just across Ward Road. The front windows of all the houses, facing the subdivision’s lone street, Arthur Drive, look out on a quiet street, with traffic counts often less than 24 vehicles per day, mostly their neighbors going to and from work. Just as they did in the early days of Torrance Addition, children still ride their bikes and trikes and roller skate down the hill on Arthur Drive without much worry of traffic. When residents come home from work, they are careful to watch for the kids playing in the streets after school.

City water and sewers were part of the overall construction package in Torrance Addition. Utilities are all underground, making for a pleasing view-scape. Soil consists generally of clay and silty clay. Well-maintained grassy lawns, trees, shrubbery and specialized plantings exhibit individual owner’s tastes. The overall streetscape reflects neighborhood pride.

As for the cul de sac on which Torance’s original house was located, Torrance Hill Addition now contains five residential lots with homes, set well back from the street with complete privacy. Two of the homes were built before 1955, one for Ell Torrance in 1948, and the other for Harold Schafer, founder of the Gold Seal company, the maker of Mr. Bubble, in 1953. That home has since been sold to, and is occupied by, former Bismarck Mayor John Warford. The original Torrance house is owned by the Miller family, founders of longtime Bismarck company Miller Insulation, which, like Gold Seal, does business nationwide.

The most recent addition to the development was in 2020. The two remaining homes were built in the 1970s.Three of the homes are valued at more than $1 million in city assessing records, and the other two between $500,000 and $1 million.

While this amendment only includes the 21 homes in the Torrance Addition and does not request the addition of the homes in the Torrance Hill cul de sac to the Historic District, perhaps sometime in the future we might seek to add them, completing the large geographic area most residents now just refer to as Highland Acres.

The addition of Torrance Addition to the housing boom in west Bismarck had one more benefit to the city. It spurred Wilhite and Seay to purchase additional land to the north of Torrance Addition and begin developing it, and by the end of the 1970s, several dozen more homes were added to the neighborhood in Highland Acres Second and Third Additions, along streets like the one in Torrance Addition, and in three cul de sacs facing the golf course.

Many years later, in a visit to the Torrance Addition neighborhood, Ell Torrance’s son, Richard, a noted West Coast musician and recording artist who has now relocated to Bismarck and serves as music director to a local church in his retirement years, admired the calm neighborhood from the top of Arthur Drive, but lamented the days of his youth. “My sister and I rode our horses here,” he said wistfully, “and went sledding down this hill.”

This link will take you to the earlier history of Bismarck’s Highland Acres National Historic District.