The WPA House: the reservoir caretaker's residence, at the boundary

1937–1995 · PENN TOWNSHIP, AT THE CITY'S RESERVOIR

The boundary, printed plainly: This house does not stand in Mishawaka. It stands in Penn Township, at 16581 Chandler Boulevard, three-tenths of a mile south of its original site beside the city's reservoir — the reservoir the city built in 1929 amid the Mishawaka Hills south of Dragoon Trail. The reservoir is Mishawaka's; the ground is not, and the entry is printed at boundary size on that line, as this history prints the city's own reservoir wherever else it appears. The house enters the built record because it is a Mishawaka building in every other sense: built for the city's water supply, by a federal works program on the city's application, occupied under the city's arrangement, nearly demolished by the city, and saved by the city's preservation corporation, which moved it. It was listed on 14 August 1998, the same day as the Carnegie library — the city's two 1998 listings being the library it had stopped using and the caretaker's house it had stopped needing.

The building: The reservoir's isolation was the problem: gates found disturbed meant draining the whole supply against contamination, and a resident caretaker was the remedy. The city's Works Progress Administration application of 1937 was authorized that December, and from March to December 1938 some thirty WPA men built the house: a solid brick one-and-a-half-story cottage on a seven-inch poured concrete slab over a full basement, a fieldstone chimney, metal-framed casement windows — all original when the nomination was written — and, embedded in its east wall, a limestone plaque inscribed "Built By Federal Works Progress Administration. 1937–1938," carved at Bedford by WPA stonecutters. The cost came to slightly over $10,000 with a supplement of nearly $2,100, most of it labor. The occupants were never water-department employees: William D. Buckles, past seventy, leased it in February 1939 as "watchman and caretaker" and stayed about four years; the Floyd Swartzlander family followed in February 1944 — Swartzlander was a city lineman, killed by a work accident that October; Dwight and Mabel Snyder came next, at fifteen dollars a month — Snyder also a city lineman, and a pallbearer at Swartzlander's funeral — and stayed decades. Dwight died in 1969; the city let Mabel remain; she vacated in 1990, the last occupant on the original site.

The move: By then the city had long decided no caretaker was needed. Maintenance slid; the house was boarded; the city wanted it demolished. Preservationists campaigned, and the city agreed to sell on one condition — that the house be moved. The Beiger Heritage Corporation bought it and moved it in 1995, three-tenths of a mile to Lot 2 of Kalka's Subdivision, where a member of the corporation's own board bought it to live in: the owner of record at the nomination was Peter De Kever, the city's commissioned historian, whose unpublished 1996 manuscript, House on a Hill: The Story of Mishawaka's WPA House, is the nomination's first bibliography entry. The nomination's verdict carries the house's rarity in its authors' own words: WPA caretakers' dwellings are rare, the others known in Indiana stood on state lands and are altered or demolished, and "the Mishawaka reservoir caretaker's dwelling stands alone as a remarkably intact example of WPA workmanship applied to domestic architecture." It stands on the Register under Criteria A and C and Criteria Consideration B — moved, like the Ellis-Schindler House, to save it; the Register's two moved Mishawaka houses are the city's oldest building and its smallest. The nomination notes in passing a second WPA water building still standing — the water department's storage building in the 200 block of Virgil Street, unlisted — and it is carried here at anchor size on the nomination's word.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Mishawaka Reservoir Caretaker's Residence (1998), read first-hand — the reservoir of 1929 and the contamination problem, the 1937 application and December authorization, the 1938 construction and its fabric in full, the Bedford plaque, the costs, the three tenancies whole, the boarded years and the demolition intent, the 1995 move and its condition, the De Kever ownership and manuscript, the "stands alone" verdict, and the Virgil Street storage building.
2. National Register Information System — listing 14 August 1998, #98001053; the database's areas line against the form's, registered in this section's note.