Visible for miles across the prairie, Bloomfield Square centers on the Second Empire style Davis County courthouse, completed in 1877 at a cost of $45,201 and topped by a 9 foot tall blind "Goddess of Justice" holding sword and scales. The Victorian period square includes 53 buildings arranged around this centralized edifice as an example of mid-American town planning, with Italianate, Queen Anne, Classical Revival, and especially commercial vernacular architecture reflecting local traditions, materials, and building methods. In 1892, a fire destroyed most of the Franklin Street south side, which was quickly rebuilt with many storefronts using facades made by the Meaker Brothers Iron Works of St. Louis, Missouri, better known as "Meskers," whose mass-produced ornamental sheet-metal facades and cast-iron components were ordered through catalogs and shipped by rail. The south side has seven Meskers in a row, including the Latimer, Hill's, and M. Owsley buildings, and other ornate examples include the 1893 Traverse Block on the southwest corner and the Queen Anne-inspired 106 E. Jefferson on the north side. Around the square, upper stories in the 1800s housed cigar factories, professional offices, and meeting spaces for fraternities and political organizations, while lower storefronts held grocers, jewelers, dry goods stores, drugstores, restaurants, hardware stores, and buggy dealerships. Various fraternal orders occupied upper story spaces, including the Masons, the Knights of Pythias, and the International Order of Odd Fellows, which in 1868 established the first women's lodge in the world, the Daughters of Rebekah. In 1924, Henry "The Human Fly" Roland unsuccessfully tried to climb the courthouse before hundreds of spectators, fell thirty-five feet, broke his hip, recovered, and returned in 1932 to succeed. The square has served as the community meeting place and business district since the mid-1800s, drawing travelers along routes such as the Rainbow Highway / Glacier and Daniel Boone Trails, sections of which became US Hwy 63, and the Waubonsie Trail, sections of which became IA Highway 2, while locals also circled the square in a nightly auto ritual. The twentieth century brought prosperity, later decline left buildings in disrepair, and recent rehabilitation efforts restored many Victorian elements. Bloomfield Square is also tied to Davis County's old nickname, the "Hairy Nation," a mid-1800s label for rough, hairy, rude-mannered, unkempt residents, many of them poor squatters from out of state in the county's southwest who settled in Indian Territory, helped fuel a jurisdictional dispute between Iowa and Missouri, and inspired a name so widely used that legislators were sometimes recognized as gentlemen from the Hairy Nation; the phrase was memorialized in Henry Ethell's 1883 publication The Rise of Progress and Civilization in the Hairy Nation and remains popular today.