 National Register nominations are based on identifying a property significance or importance at some level in some aspect of our nation's history. So it may be significant to her nation as a whole or it may be important to a local community. The process of evaluating a property's potential significance is a process of identifying a historic context. A context we're talking about a theme, a time and a place. A theme may be agriculture, community planning and development, architecture, education. In establishing whether a property is important to a community, we first have to understand what this theme is and how this property fits into that theme. So if we're looking at the significance of a bank building in a small town, we're going to look at the development of that small town as an economic center. We're going to evaluate its importance as a commercial center to the surrounding area. How far apart are similar towns? Is it likely that this was a center of commerce for an entire county, the east half of a county, a three-county region? Then we're going to look at what other economic institutions may have been in that community. Is this the only bank where there are multiple banks? Where did this bank fall in the continuum of the establishment of these banks? Did this bank have something about it that may have set it apart? Perhaps it was the only one that didn't fail during the Great Depression. This is where local people went to save their money, to invest their money, to borrow money. Sometimes the bank officers were important in the community. What you're doing is you're looking at this property within a context defined sometimes by its function, sometimes by its physical qualities. And you're evaluating it against other similar properties within that context. And if there aren't other similar properties within the importance of that theme overall. This is how you establish significance.