The House Museums, One by One — and the Mansion Told Two Ways

The house-museum form in Mishawaka rests on one house, and this entry takes it at full size. The Beiger Mansion on Lincolnway East — Martin V. Beiger's stone house, built at the height of the Mishawaka Woolen fortune and listed on the National Register on 7 September 1973 — is the city's mansion house museum: the Mishawaka Historical Society held it, kept it as the city's historic house, and lost its interior to the arson fire of 20 January 1975, in society hands; the society sold it on 1 August 1989 to Ron Montandon and Dennis Slade, who restored it and opened it as an inn. The two-tellings problem the checklist names stands on this house in full. The first telling is the documented one the museums fragment prints: the industrialist's house, the society's museum, the fire, the restoration — a course carried by the Register nomination, the fire record and the sale. The second telling is the inn era's: the house as a place with presences, carried not by the documented record but by its owners' own talk — Montandon and Slade discuss the paranormal experiences they attribute to the house in the podcast record of 2025 and 2026 (the Round the Bend podcast's Beiger episode of April 2026; the Behind the Region interview of 21 November 2025), and the inn's own publicity lists a filming of the television program Psychic Detective at the house among its notices. The haunted-places section weighs that lore as lore; here it stands as the museum fact it is: the same rooms are interpreted two ways, once by the record and once by the trade that now keeps them, and a visitor meets both tellings at the same door. The small or worker's house, the second half of the form, has no Mishawaka instance in this record. No worker's cottage, mill house or immigrant house in the city is kept as a museum — the Belgian West End's houses, the city's richest surviving worker housing, stand as houses, interpreted in the neighborhoods and peoples sections but not opened as a house museum; and the Hannah Lindahl Children's Museum, the city's other long-lived museum, was a museum in a reused building, not a house museum — its course stands in the museums fragment. The form thus prints at its true size: one mansion, told twice; the worker's house absent, and named absent.