Genius Brothers Building
Jct. of 8th St. and 4th Ave., Kinder, LAThe Genius Brothers Building is locally significant in the area of commerce as a rare reminder of Kinder's historic role as a commercial hub.
The town developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a small commercial center servicing nearby logging operations and local farmers. It was incorporated as a village in 1903 and as a town with a population of 1,088 in 1911. Growth began with the coming of the Kansas City, Watkins, and Gulf Railroad in 1890 and was spurred by a lumber boom in western Allen Parish which lasted into the 1920s. Kinder was not a lumber company town, nor did it participate significantly in the transport of timber to the sawmill boom town of Lake Charles. Its raison d'etre was trade and service for the local population. An exhaustively compiled local history describes over thirty businesses that flourished in Kinder during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These ran the gamut from confectioneries to livery stables, to rice field canal dredging, to dry goods, to soda bottling. There was also a theatre, a restaurant, a bank, a dentist, and several barbers and beauticians. The Genius Brothers Building was divided in two. One half contained the Genius Brothers Pharmacy and "modern" soda fountain while the other half contained the area's only men's clothing store.
Kinder's decline as a commercial hub began with the decline in the local lumbering industry in the later 1920s. In the period after World War II, the automobile made it possible for people to shop in other places. Most of the town's historic commercial buildings have disappeared. Today only seven remain, one of which (an old hotel) is in the process of demolition. As one of the survivors, the Genius Brothers Building is a significant reminder of Kinder's one-time local commercial preeminence. (For the record, the other buildings in town are also very basic commercial vernacular structures and are in a comparable state of integrity. The only one earlier than the candidate building is from 1914, and the others look to be from the 1920s. Also, the buildings in question do not group together to form a district.)
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1990.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.