Tippecanoe Place — the Clement Studebaker House (1886–89)

1886–89 – present

The house: A block west of Copshaholm, at 620 West Washington Avenue, stands the wagon works' answer to it. Clement Studebaker bought the parcel in 1868 and lived in an earlier house on the site; in 1886 he moved that house to 202 South Scott Street — it is no longer extant — and began the mansion on the bluff. After examining fine houses in Chicago he hired Chicago architect Henry Ives Cobb; the builders were Christopher Fassnacht and Robert Braunsdorf of South Bend. The house, in the nomination's classification a Richardsonian Romanesque composition of glacial boulders, rose over three years and was ready for occupancy in February 1889. It is a four-story house of 40 rooms and 20 fireplaces; its size is carried at 24,000 square feet in the restaurant-era accounts and at 26,000 in the university's survey record, and both figures stand in the record as printed here. The cost is consistently carried at about $250,000, with a further $100,000 in furnishings. The name has two documented theories, and the record prints both: Clement's friendship with Benjamin Harrison, grandson of William Henry Harrison of Tippecanoe; and the ground's own older use as a Miami camping place of that name.

The fire and the family years: The house had been occupied barely six months when fire gutted its interior on 9 October 1889; by 1890 it had been restored, and Clement lived in it until his death in 1901. His widow Anna died in 1916, and the house passed to their son George, whose family were the last Studebakers to keep it as a home; bankruptcy in the Depression forced them out in 1933, and the mansion stood empty through the 1930s. The city at one point threatened the house with demolition for a parking lot — the threat the Government section of this history records among the renewal era's ledgers — and what saved it first was a new use, then the law.

School, preservation, restaurant: In 1941 the businessman E. M. Morris bought the mansion for $20,000 and gave it to the South Bend Board of Education for a school for handicapped children; during the Second World War it served first as a regional headquarters of the Red Cross, and in 1947 the E. M. Morris School for Crippled Children opened in it, operating until 1970, with school offices following into the mid-1970s. The house then passed to Southhold Restorations, Inc., the local preservation group — the National Register nomination of 1973 already names Southhold as owner — which held it while the West Washington district fight was won around it. The house was listed on the National Register on 2 July 1973 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977, the county's only landmark. In 1979 Continental Restaurant Systems bought it and spent some $2 million converting it; the Tippecanoe Place Restaurant opened in 1980 and ran for 46 years. The restaurant's own house history dates the Matteoni family's purchase to 2001; some later accounts say 2008. In January 2026 the restaurant announced its closure for good, and as this history is written in November 2026 the mansion's next chapter is unwritten — the building itself, a landmark in law and in fact, stands.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Clement Studebaker House (Tippecanoe Place), and the National Register Information System record 73000044 — the Cobb design, the glacial boulders, the 1868 site and earlier house, the February 1889 occupancy, Southhold Restorations as owner, listing of 2 July 1973.
2. Discover Indiana (The History Museum) and the Tippecanoe Place house history — the $250,000 cost and $100,000 furnishings, the George Studebaker inheritance, the 1941 Morris gift, the Red Cross years, and the restaurant's conversion and 1980 opening; the occupants' chronology in the house history for the school years and the 2001 Matteoni purchase.
3. Building South Bend, "Tippecanoe Place" (ND-SB-00083) — the 26,000 square feet and the Fassnacht building credit.
4. South Bend News-Times, Aaron Helman, "What's Next for Tippecanoe Place?" (6 April 2026) — the fire of 9 October 1889 and its restoration by 1890, the school years' end in 1970, and the restaurant's closure announced in January 2026.