The Houses the Fortunes Built

Fort Wayne's wealth is most visible where it was spent on houses, and several of the greatest survive as public or semi-public places. They are gathered here as a group; the fortunes behind them are in the entries above.

The treaty house: The Richardville House (1827) at the Forks of the Wabash — Greek Revival, built for about $2,200, with its wall safe — is the oldest of the city's great houses and the only one that was also a seat of government. It stayed in Richardville's family until 1894, was acquired by the Historical Society in 1991, and became a National Historic Landmark in 2012.

The homestead: The Swinney Homestead (1844–45), Thomas Swinney's house on the land he left the city, stands in Swinney Park — a working farm's big house rather than a mansion, and the only great house in the city that came with 240 acres of park attached.

The ironmaster's palace: Brookside, John H. Bass's mansion — built 1887, burned February 1902, rebuilt 1902–04 by Wing & Mahurin, sold by the family to the Sisters of St. Francis in 1944 for $60,000 with more than 65 acres — is now the centerpiece of the University of Saint Francis, restored for $4.5 million by 2010. It is, by the News-Sentinel's judgment, the grandest home ever built in Fort Wayne.

The bankers' row: Hugh McCulloch's own Fort Wayne house was listed on the National Register in 1980. His son Charles, the Hamilton National Bank president, built half of the McCulloch-Weatherhogg Double House at 334–336 East Berry Street — a banker's house designed by the architect whose name it also carries, Charles Weatherhogg. On West Berry Street, Theodore Thieme's 1898 Queen Anne (Marshall Mahurin) became the city's first art museum building by his gift in 1921. The Henry G. Olds house at Berry and Ewing streets, the wagon maker's mansion, later housed the Mizpah Shrine Temple. And in the Williams-Woodland Park district stands the Calvin English House, the Lincoln Life medical director's home — the house of the man whose stock became the English-Bonter-Mitchell Foundation.

The art museum's second home: The B. Paul Mossman House (1905, Wing & Mahurin) at 1202 West Wayne Street — Richardsonian Romanesque, all stone and tower — was the hardware wholesaler's gift to the city in 1949 and the art museum's home until 1983, when Thieme's museum finally outgrew the second house a fortune had given it. It is now the Castle Gallery, a private residence open as a gallery.

The boulevard: The Forest Park Boulevard Historic District is the industrial generation's collective monument. Builder Louis Curdes envisioned the boulevard; the Forest Park Addition was platted in 1906 by the Tri-State Loan and Trust Company; the boulevard runs 130 feet wide behind stone gateposts, most of its houses were finished by 1916, and Curdes wrote restrictions into the deeds that preserved its character for a century. The National Register listed it in 2007. Its styles are Colonial Revival and Tudor Revival, with the Franke House (1914) at 2131 Forest Park Boulevard as the exception that proves the street's ambition — a Prairie-style house by Barry Byrne of Chicago, a former Frank Lloyd Wright student. Many of the boulevard's houses were designed by Charles R. Weatherhogg, and its residents, in Visit Fort Wayne's phrase, were "important members of the city" — the foundry, banking, and insurance families of Parts One and Two, living on one street.

The planned suburbs: Wildwood Park was wealth spent not on a house but on a neighborhood: Lee J. Ninde, a Harvard-trained lawyer, and his wife Joel Roberts Ninde — said to be Indiana's first woman architect — formed the Wildwood Builders Company in 1910, bought the Hoffman farm for $38,000, and hired Boston's Arthur A. Shurcliff to plan it (1914–16). It was the first planned community in northeastern Indiana with deed restrictions and architectural review; no house under $6,500 could be built there. Only seven houses stood by 1923, but the plan outlasted the builders — Joel Ninde died in 1916 — and the completed neighborhood was listed on the National Register on September 18, 2013. Beside it in age is the Williams-Woodland Park Historic District, built on land once held by Jesse Williams, the Wabash and Erie Canal's chief engineer and Allen Hamilton's banking partner: after a real estate deal in 1903, the canal engineer's woodland became, in the Genealogical Society's words, "a sought-after community for Fort Wayne's prominent citizens," listed on the National Register in 1991.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places — the Bass Mansion listing (1982); the Forest Park Boulevard Historic District (2007); the Wildwood Park Historic District (September 18, 2013); the Williams-Woodland Park Historic District (1991).
2. City of Fort Wayne, historic district brochures — Forest Park Boulevard (Curdes, the 130-foot boulevard, the 1906 plat); Wildwood Park (Shurcliff and the Nindes, the deed restrictions).
3. Fort Wayne News-Sentinel, Cityscapes (January 10, 1994) — Wildwood Park: the $38,000 farm purchase, the $6,500 minimum house, the seven houses of 1923.
4. Visit Fort Wayne, "Historical Neighborhoods of Fort Wayne" — Forest Park Boulevard, Wildwood Park, Williams-Woodland Park.
5. West Central Neighborhood Association — the Mossman house and its museum years; sources for the individual houses as cited in the entries above.