Wilke Hotel

She was curious if this building was still standing but I knew right away since it is a wooden structure that it either had burned down or was torn down.
I was trying to determine the location of the building and guessed it was between Fourth & Fifth Streets.
Then I noticed the name "Paul" on the building on the right.
Having worked on hundreds of old Main Street pictures, I immediately thought this might be the Paul Moerke building, so I searched my database and sure enough, the building on the left side of the Moerke building below matches the hotel picture above and "Paul" matches exactly for both pix.
Then I searched for other Main Street pictures to see if I could find some that showed these buildings and had a lot of success.

Freda told me the story when this building caught on fire. A girl was walking up the stairs to the library and told Freda she smelled smoke - sure enough things got smoky so Freda called in the fire and told them the fire station was on fire - at first they thought it was a prank call but she convinced them and the firemen showed up to put out the fire and save the building.

1909 Main Street - the arrow points to the hotel. At this time it was the Uthoff Hotel (Emil Uthoff) before Wilke purchased it.

Now the Nielsen Hotel. I would guess that Claus Nielsen, Sr., purchased the hotel from the Wilke family.
I have not researched the Steen & Moeller business.
The Becker livery barn burned down sometime after the above photo was taken.

The bricks are now on Main Street so sometime after 1915.
I just noticed where the Gambles Store was once located on the very north end of this block.
Either a 2nd story was added or a new 2 story building was built. Compare the older picture just above.

The wooden hotel structure was torn down and replaced by this brick one (arrow).
At some point after this it was the first location of Ral/Mars (Ralph & Martha Hagedorn).
Before moving across the street on the west side, when the Manning Plaza was built.

There were 2 Julius Wilke families that lived in Manning at the same time. I haven't figured out how they are related but it would be a good bet they were, as these 2 families eventually moved to Oelwein, Iowa.
Several of their children attended Manning grade school during the 1908 to 1916 time period.

When I published the Manning Schools history book in 2009, I asked several volunteers to go through all of the official school books that list the students names for each year and they filled out spreadsheets for me for everyone who graduated and those who did not graduate here for various reasons..
This information has proven to be the one of the most invaluable databases for me as I use it all of the time for various historical feature stories and many times it proves a family was in Manning when working on obituaries that don't mention Manning.