Whitcomb & Keller — the subdividers

About 1900 – documented through the 1920s

The firm: The Communities record carries the neighborhoods; the firm that built them stands here, from the University of Notre Dame's Building South Bend property records, which meet the company house by house. Leslie Whitcomb was a local real-estate developer building by 1900 — he built the house at 937 Riverside Drive that year. The partnership of Leslie Whitcomb and Seth Hammond built many of the homes of the North St. Joseph Street district on filled river lowland; by 1912 that district was nearly half full, at 39 houses. Whitcomb's partner Fred Keller was elected Mayor of South Bend in 1913; his own house, at 609 Portage Avenue, was built in 1905.

The corporation: By the 1920s the Whitcomb and Keller Corporation was building houses across the East Wayne Street and Sunnymede ground, as rental and as sale properties, and the property records name its work address by address: 721 Lincolnway East in 1920; the Niven House and the McErlain House, 1226 East Wayne Street South and 1215 East Wayne, in 1925, the McErlain among the first houses in Sunnymede; the Keller House at 1418 East Wayne in 1926; the Morris, Harrer, Bickel, and Harris houses in 1928; the Osborne House in 1929 — several of them to designs by H. R. Stapp. Fred Keller's son Granville was a salesman for the corporation. The neighborhoods these houses made are the Communities record's; the developer who platted, built, rented, and sold them is the business record's, and he was missing from it.

Sources:

1. University of Notre Dame, Building South Bend property records — Leslie Whitcomb's building by 1900 and the Riverside Drive house; the Whitcomb and Hammond partnership and the North St. Joseph Street district; Fred Keller's mayoralty of 1913 and his Portage Avenue house; and the Whitcomb and Keller Corporation's houses of the 1920s, address by address, with the Stapp designs and Granville Keller's salesmanship.