The Eller-Hosford House: the Italianate survivor

1875–1983 · 722 LINCOLNWAY EAST

The house: At 722 Lincolnway East stands the frame Italianate the 1979 city survey's aftermath called, in its nomination's words, the most intact of its kind left in the city: a two-story central unit with a smaller one-story east wing, on a native stone foundation, clapboard-sided under a flat roof, its eaves carried on paired ornate brackets above an entablature frieze with decorative oval panels, its windows segmental-arched. Elom Eller, a farmer, built it in 1875–1877 and mortgaged the property to do it. The nomination's builder line reads "Unknown"; the Register's database credits Eller himself as the house's architect-builder — both statements stand in the formal record, and both are printed here. Eller sold in 1880 to Captain and Mrs. Henry Milburn, of the Milburn Wagon Works family whose wagon works stood among the young city's largest employers; in 1889 it passed to William Beach Hosford, a vice-president of the Dodge Manufacturing Company who had helped build the local water works and electric company and sat on the city council, and Hosford held it more than forty years.

The clubhouse years: In May 1932 Hosford sold the house to the Mishawaka Women's Club, and for almost forty years it was the city's clubhouse — lent out, in the nomination's telling, to the Red Cross, the Camp Fire Girls and the Spanish-American War Veterans among its users. The club sold in 1971 to Donald W. Crawford, the owner of record when the nomination was filed. The house that survives is in part the product of a deliberate un-siding: in a renovation of 1979–1980, the 1930s asphalt shingle siding that had covered it was stripped away, the original clapboarding restored, and both porches rebuilt from the surviving physical evidence and historical photographs. The 1979 city survey had found only a very few Italianate houses remaining in Mishawaka; the nomination, prepared by Philip W. Cartwright of LeRoy Troyer and Associates on 8 August 1979, calls this one the most intact of them, and the Register listed it on 27 January 1983, under criteria for both its architecture and its social history — a farm family's mortgaged house that became a wagon man's, then a Dodge executive's, then the women's clubhouse of the whole city, each tenure legible in the fabric.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Eller-Hosford House (1979), prepared by Philip W. Cartwright, LeRoy Troyer and Associates, read first-hand — the fabric, the Eller construction and mortgage, the Milburn and Hosford tenures, the Women's Club years 1932–1971, the 1979–80 renovation, the survey's Italianate count and the "most intact" judgment.
2. National Register Information System — listing 27 January 1983, #83000101; criteria Event and Architecture/Engineering; the database's architect credit to Elom Eller against the form's "Unknown."