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26 APRIL 1889 · 415 LINCOLNWAY EAST
The proof: The red-brick Queen Anne at 415 Lincolnway East is believed built in 1889, and the belief is proven from inside the fabric of the house itself. The ordinary documentary trail had been destroyed: the city and county had destroyed all tax records earlier than 1941, leaving an 1884 assessor's book showing no improvements on the lot and an 1893 county memoir showing "the fine brick residence" standing. The proof came during the house's restoration in the 1970s, when a workman found "April 26, 1889" penciled inside a stair tread, in the hollow where a spindle fits — recorded there by the stair's maker eighty-eight years before, waiting out the building's whole first life inside its own staircase. The house keeps two more oddities of the same kind. Its original front stair, taken out when the house was cut into three apartments after Mrs. Hattie Dodge's death in 1922, was not destroyed: it was stored entire in the attic, and at the restoration the stair went back together from its own parts. And the house stands at all because of a vote: the Presbyterian Church next door bought the property to demolish it for parking, having already demolished the house at 409 for that purpose; members protested, the question was put to the full membership, and the members voted not to demolish. The nomination that records all of this — prepared in 1977, listing followed on 8 September 1978 — made the rescued house the working headquarters of the city's preservation record: the address on later nominations is this house.
Sources: the Architecture section of this history — the National Register nomination, Dodge House (prepared by Arlene Hunter, LeRoy Troyer and Associates, 1 October 1977), read first-hand: the stair-tread date of 26 April 1889, the destroyed tax records, the stored stair, the church's purchase and the membership vote, the 409 Lincolnway East demolition; National Register listing of 8 September 1978, #78000052.