A Museum Room in a Private House, 1908

317 Lincolnway East, completed 1908

The first room in Mishawaka ever called a museum was inside a private mansion. Martin Valentine Beiger, the Mishawaka Woolen magnate whose company became Ball Band, and his wife Susie built the city's grandest house at 317 Lincolnway East — planned from 1900, begun in 1903, completed in 1908 at a cost of $100,000, some 40 rooms across 21,790 square feet. The room inventory of the house as built includes, between the one-lane bowling alley and the music room with its $25,000 three-manual Aeolian organ, "a museum" — the Beigers' own collection room, a fixture of the Gilded Age great house, private as the ballroom was private. It is printed here at exactly that size: not a public museum, but the word's first documented home in the city.

Susie Beiger, widowed in 1903 before the house was finished, lived in it until her death in 1927 and left it in trust as a home for the care of elderly women, endowing it with $210,000 of her estate; the home opened February 1, 1930, and operated until 1967. The mansion's museum room, its furnishings, and its fate after 1927 are not separately traced in the record reached — what happened to the house itself, the record does trace, and it is the next article's story.

Principal sources

1. "Beiger Mansion," the house's documented account (Wikipedia and its mirrors), drawing on the National Register record — the construction dates and cost, the room inventory including "a museum," the organ, Susie Beiger's trust and the 1930 opening of the home.
2. Visit South Bend Mishawaka, "Around the Bend: The Beiger Mansion" — the 1908 completion; 21,790 square feet, the largest home in Mishawaka at the time.