The walls came tumbling down, and it didn’t take that long. On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 8, part of Humboldt’s history as a downtown came to a crashing end. Workers and machines from Midwest Construction Services of Fort Dodge, a sub-contractor for general contractor Sande Construction of Humboldt, demolished the Parley Finch buildings, 611-615 Sumner Avenue. Most of the buildings came down in relatively quick fashion, shortly after 2 p.m. An hour later, it was mostly rubble. Parley Finch was a pioneer citizen in the community (moving to Springvale, as Humboldt was then called, eight years after the town was formed). An attorney by trade, he was an active civic leader, serving as the town’s mayor in a period of robust growth in the mid 1880s and early 1890s. He served as a state representative and state senator in the late 1800s. In 1897, Finch built a fine stone structure on the north side of the 600 block of Sumner Avenue.
