The Chief Richardville House — 5705 Bluffton Road

At 5705 Bluffton Road, on the city's southwest side, stands the house Jean Baptiste de Richardville built in 1827 — the oldest documented house in Fort Wayne and one of only two National Historic Landmarks in Allen County. Richardville, chief of the Miami and by the measures of his time one of the wealthiest men in Indiana, built the house with $600 in federal treaty money provided for the purpose and roughly $1,600 of his own, about $2,200 in all — treaty documents put the federal contribution in writing, which is why the house's financing is known to the dollar nearly two centuries later. It was the first Greek Revival house in northeastern Indiana, a statement in brick by a Miami chief who dealt with presidents and treaty commissioners: the house is the artifact of the treaty era standing in the open.

Richardville died in the house in 1841, and it remained in his family until 1894 — the survival that makes the site remarkable, through the canal era, the railroad era and the removal of most of the Miami from Indiana in 1846, which Richardville's family, holding treaty exemptions, did not join. The Allen County–Fort Wayne Historical Society acquired the house in 1991, and on March 2, 2012, it was designated a National Historic Landmark, joining the Allen County Courthouse as the county's two landmarks. The house today operates as a museum interpreting Miami history; that operation is the Museums chapter's. The man's fortune and treaty record are in the Wealth and People chapters. What belongs here is the survival: a Miami chief's 1827 mansion, continuously documented from its financing to its landmark designation, still standing on Bluffton Road.

Sources: National Park Service, National Historic Landmark designation, Chief Jean Baptiste de Richardville House, March 2, 2012; Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (acgsi.org) place records; the History Center (Fort Wayne History Center) house history. Cross-references: Wealth and People chapters for Richardville; Museums chapter for the house as a museum.