The Architects and the Builder

1853 – 1977

Christopher Fassnacht, the builder of the Romanesque city: One South Bend name stands on both great houses and the great church. Christopher Fassnacht built Tippecanoe Place and Copshaholm alike — the Register credits him, with Robert Braunsdorf, on the Studebaker mansion, and the Oliver documentation names him as Copshaholm's builder — and he built the First Presbyterian Church of 1888 besides. He was a developer as well as a contractor: it was Fassnacht who bought and platted the southern portion of the Chapin estate in 1891 and moved the Chapin House in the doing of it. The Romanesque South Bend of fieldstone and glacial boulder that this section has described is, in large part, one local builder's executed work.

Austin & Shambleau: The city's own first-rank firm was Austin & Shambleau, founded in 1909 by Ennis R. Austin and N. Roy Shambleau and dissolved in 1942, a partnership that has been described as the most distinguished architectural firm in northern Indiana. Austin had practiced in South Bend from 1906, first with Walter W. Schneider — and earlier still, the firm of Austin & Parker had designed St. James Episcopal Church in 1894 — and Shambleau, born in London, Ontario in 1888 to a carriage-maker's family, had worked for South Bend architects from his youth. The downtown Multiple Resource Area narrative calls theirs the most prolific of the prominent local firms in the central business district; their standing monument is the Tower Building of 1929, and their houses run through West Washington, Chapin Park and Riverside Drive — the Hager House of 1910, Ennis Austin's own house of 1909 at 909 Riverside Drive, and dozens of the survey's rated residences. Shambleau succeeded to the practice at the firm's dissolution and worked independently into the late 1950s, dying in 1975.

The other local firms: Freyermuth & Maurer carries the Chapin Park houses of the 1890s — the house at 813 Ashland Avenue, about 1896, built for the firm's own Frank C. Freyermuth — and the Maurer name runs forward to Maurer, Van Ryn, Ogden & Natali, the firm of the County-City Building. The courthouse's supervising architect, George Selby of Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge, stayed and began his own South Bend practice, as the courthouse entry records. The pattern the MRA narrative states held for a century: a strong local bench, and Chicago for the monuments — Van Osdel for the second courthouse, Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge for the third, Beman for the J.M.S. Building and the Studebaker offices, Cobb for Tippecanoe Place, Lamb & Rich for Copshaholm, Aroner for the Palace pair, Newhouse for the Blackstone, Perkins, Fellows & Hamilton for the Farmers Security Bank, Fellheimer & Wagner for Union Station, and, at the end of the line, Johnson and Burgee for the Century Center.

Sources:

1. National Register nominations and Register records cited in the entries above — the Fassnacht credits on Tippecanoe Place, Copshaholm and the First Presbyterian Church, and the Chicago firms' attributions building by building.
2. Austin & Shambleau (firm record) — the 1909 founding, the partners' biographies, the 1942 dissolution and Shambleau's succession; Building South Bend property records — the firm's houses and the Freyermuth & Maurer attribution at 813 Ashland Avenue.
3. National Register nominations, Downtown South Bend Historic Multiple Resource Area — the narrative judgment on Austin & Shambleau as the prolific local firm and the Chicago architects' downtown works.