The Dodge House: the house a church voted not to demolish

1889–1978 · 415 LINCOLNWAY EAST

The date inside the stair: The red-brick Queen Anne at 415 Lincolnway East is believed built in 1889, and the belief is proven from inside the fabric. The city and county had destroyed all tax records earlier than 1941, and the documentary trail was thin — an 1884 assessor's book showing no improvements on the lot, an 1893 county memoir showing "the fine brick residence" standing. The proof came during the house's 1970s restoration, when a workman found "April 26, 1889" penciled inside a stair tread, in the hollow where a spindle fits — recorded there by the stair's maker eighty-eight years before, waiting out the building's whole first life inside its own staircase. Lucius K. Robinson, a cooper and Civil War officer, built the house on a lot he had bought from the Milburn family in 1879, on the street then called Vistula, later Second Street, now Lincolnway; the house numbers date from 1885 and were never changed. The nomination calls it "an excellent example" of the Queen Anne: brick through the two lower floors, wood siding of various shapes in the gables, dormers and tower, a veranda, bay windows, restrained gingerbread, small panes of colored glass in the front gable's semi-circular window, ornate metal casings over the windows above.

The Dodge years: In 1896 the house sold to Mrs. Hattie Dodge, widow of Wallace H. Dodge, the founder of the Dodge Manufacturing Company, who had died in 1894. She lived there until her own death in 1922 — the Register carries the house under her name — added the two-story rear addition, the fireplaces and the light fixtures, and made it the city's social center for the twenty-six years of her tenure. Five distinctive fireplaces survive, with their tiles and their beveled-glass mantel mirrors. After her death the house was cut into three apartments, and its original front stair was taken out — but not destroyed: it was stored entire in the attic, and when the restoration came, the stair went back together from its own parts.

The vote: The house's survival is the Mishawaka preservation record's founding story, and the nomination tells it at full strength. The Presbyterian Church next door bought the property to demolish the house for parking — it had already demolished the house at 409 Lincolnway East, whose land became its parking lot. Members of the church protested the second demolition; the question was put to a vote of the full membership; and the members voted not to demolish. LeRoy Troyer and Associates, architects, then bought the house, restored it as the firm's own office — the front parlor to be kept as an authentic 1890–1900 museum room — and leased land on Third Street for the parking the church had wanted, taking the pressure off the lot. The nomination, prepared by Arlene Hunter of the firm on 1 October 1977, names the surviving row of big houses on the street "antique alley" and warns that its zoning is "center core" — the warning and the rescue both standing in the filing that listed the house on 8 September 1978. The Dodge House went on to serve as the working headquarters of the city's house-by-house preservation record: the firm's address on the Eller-Hosford and Merrifield-Cass nominations is this house. The Beiger Heritage Corporation took the Wallace-Dodge House on among its projects after selling the Beiger mansion in 1989, on the Tribune's account.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Dodge House (1977), prepared by Arlene Hunter, LeRoy Troyer and Associates, read first-hand — the 1889 stair-tread date and the dead tax-record trail, the Robinson construction, the Queen Anne fabric, the Dodge tenure 1896–1922, the apartment years and the stored stair, the church's purchase, the membership vote, the 409 Lincolnway East demolition, the Troyer purchase and restoration, and the "antique alley" naming.
2. National Register Information System — listing 8 September 1978, #78000052; style Queen Anne; significant name Dodge, Mrs. Wallace H.
3. South Bend Tribune, 2010, via the Michiana Business & Research Library catalogue — Beiger Heritage's later taking-on of the Wallace-Dodge House.