The Two Oldest Houses: the Talley House

Register row L22-#2 · closes as a NAMED GAP (the pair cannot both be fixed from open sources)

The Talley house, at the size the landmark record carries it: Dorothy Corson's A Cave of Candles, chapter 4, printing the Historic Preservation Commission's account and the St. Joseph County Public Library's newspaper biography clipping file, carries the house whole: "a large red brick two-story house" on the east side of Juniper Road near Cleveland Road, about a mile north of the University of Notre Dame, "built by Alfred Talley, born in 1809, who was a printer from Chicago." Talley and his children bought 232.24 acres in Clay Township (the purchase the banked stories file dates to 1856). The house received landmark status in June 1975, by the Commission's own account as Corson prints it. In the early 1950s it was bought by its last owner in Corson's telling, Robert O'Connor. Its basement's small rooms carry the Underground Railroad tradition the banked stories file tests and prints UNPROVEN; that verdict is not disturbed here — this entry owns the fabric, not the legend. A boundary flag is printed with it: Corson places the house in Clay Township north of Notre Dame, and whether that ground stands inside the Census boundary of the CDP is not settled by any source reached in this section; the house is carried in the banked build as this ground's candidate oldest house, and the flag stands until the parcel record is read against the TIGERweb polygon.

The Adams Road stage-stop house, at its true size: the second candidate — the still-standing brick house on Adams Road across from present-day Covington Shores, remembered as a stage stop where tradition holds Fathers Sorin and Granger said Mass — stands in the banked spine at tradition size only: no builder, no building date, no survey description and no parcel year-built figure for it appears in any open source reached in this section, and the searches run for this item (the Commission's published landmark material, the SHAARD public portal, the press record) returned no fabric record for the address. The SHAARD portal itself states the limit plainly: its data come from prior inventories and nominations, most properties in it are private, and "absence of data does not necessarily indicate the absence of resources" — the professional-access site file, not the public portal, is where a survey card for this house would sit.

The gap, and its settler: the verified pair the checklist asks for — each of the two oldest houses at full article size with builder, date and survival course — cannot be completed from open sources, because the Adams Road house's builder and date are not in them. The settler is named exactly as the register names it: the St. Joseph County Historic Preservation Commission's survey files and a professional-access query of SHAARD (Indiana DHPA), read against the county parcel year-built record for the Adams Road address. The Talley half stands dug above; the pair closes as a named gap on the Adams Road half.

Sources:

1. Dorothy Corson, A Cave of Candles, ch. 4 (University of Notre Dame) — the Talley/Chirhart house: built by Alfred Talley (b. 1809, printer from Chicago), the 232.24-acre Clay Township purchase, landmark status June 1975, Robert O'Connor as last owner in the early 1950s, the basement-rooms tradition; sources inside the chapter named as the Historic Preservation Commission and the SJCPL biography clipping file.
2. Indiana DNR, SHAARD public portal (shaard.dnr.in.gov) — the database's own scope statement: data from prior inventories and nominations; absence of data is not absence of resources.
3. The Story of Granger and Famous Stories & the Record (banked) — the Adams Road stage-stop tradition and the Talley UGRR verdict (UNPROVEN), cross-referenced, not retold; no builder or date for the Adams Road house in either file.
4. Settler named: St. Joseph County Historic Preservation Commission survey files; SHAARD professional-access query (Indiana DHPA); county parcel year-built record.