Museums That Stayed on Paper

Mishawaka, 1970s

Twice in the 1970s, a Mishawaka museum was proposed in writing and never built; both proposals survive in the documents that proposed them, and they are printed at that size. The first is an aircraft museum. When the old Carnegie library on North Hill Street passed from the city to the Beiger Heritage Corporation and then, in February 1976, to George Kilbey, Kilbey proposed using the landmark library building as an aircraft museum. "Although it never occurred," the library's National Register nomination records, in the sentence that is the proposal's whole documented life. The building's course ran otherwise — vacancy, litigation, the Register listing of 1998, and a restaurant in 2018 — and no aircraft collection was ever seated in it.

The second is a museum parlor. The National Register nomination for the Dodge House, the 1889 Queen Anne house at 415 Lincolnway East, planned the great house's front parlor as a period room: "To make a part of the Dodge House an authentic museum piece, in its own original setting is planned. The beautiful front parlor, needing little renovation except cleaning, will be furnished in the period of 1890 to 1900's, and will be kept for this use only." Whether the parlor was ever furnished and kept so is not in the record reached; the nomination is a plan, and the plan is what this section prints. The settling sources for both are the Mishawaka Historic Preservation Commission's files and the houses' own later records.

Principal sources

1. Fine, National Register nomination, Mishawaka Carnegie Library (1997), sections 7–8 — the Kilbey aircraft-museum proposal of 1976, "although it never occurred"; via this build's Libraries pass.
2. National Register nomination, Dodge House, 415 Lincolnway East (NPS, npgallery.nps.gov) — the planned museum parlor, quoted.