The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
Joel Roberts Ninde was born in Alabama in 1874 and came to Fort Wayne in 1900 after marrying Fort Wayne attorney Lee J. Ninde. She had no formal architectural schooling: she was a self-taught architect. In 1909 (the Allen County Genealogical Society's dating; a 1994 News-Sentinel account says 1910) she and her husband organized the Wildwood Builders Company, and she became its designing architect.
Working with Grace E. Crosby, who ran the firm's architecture department, Ninde designed more than 300 Fort Wayne houses by 1914 — among them the houses of Shawnee Place and of Wildwood Park, the garden suburb whose winding streets and English-influenced houses made her reputation. She promoted the work nationally through Wildwood Magazine, published from 1913 to 1917, and through the firm's plan books, which sold her Fort Wayne designs to builders across the country. The Ninde-Mead-Farnsworth House in Fort Wayne is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Ninde died on March 7, 1916, at the height of the firm's success. She is routinely described in Fort Wayne sources — including the Allen County Genealogical Society's biographical files and Visit Fort Wayne's women's-history materials — as Indiana's first woman architect.
Sources: Visit Fort Wayne, women's history materials; Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Ninde biography; News-Sentinel, "Cityscapes," January 10, 1994; National Register of Historic Places nomination, Brookview–Irvington Park Historic District.