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About 1857 – destroyed by fire, spring 1865; the site burned again 24 December 1878
Lead: The northwest corner of Main and Washington streets — the ground the Oliver Hotel would later make famous — carried South Bend's first hotel of the St. Joseph name. President Whitten bought into the lots from 1852, and about 1857 he converted his two Washington Street buildings into one hotel: the first St. Joseph Hotel. The name was the river's and the county's, and the record applies it twice — this house, and the Colfax Avenue house of 1868 told two entries below — a duplication Leeper himself flags, and one this section preserves rather than tidies away.
John A. Derbin leased the house and opened it as the Derbin Hotel about 1 December 1859. M. M. Shultz succeeded on 1 June 1861 and renamed it the National Hotel — the second house of that name in this record, the first being Whitten's own Lafayette Avenue house of 1865, told above; the two Nationals overlapped in the same small city, and the directory record alone can say how travelers told them apart. Whitten and his son-in-law Harvey C. Borden took possession in 1862. Lot Day Jr. — the Eagle's amputee of 1844, by then a hotel man — bought Borden's interest in February 1865. About two months later the hotel was destroyed in "the great fire" of that spring: a total loss, with no insurance. A continuous business block rose on the site in its place, and that block in turn was destroyed in the St. Joseph Hotel fire of 24 December 1878 — six buildings, a loss of sixty thousand dollars, and the firemen working with hands and feet frozen at five degrees below zero. The upper stories of the block rebuilt after that second fire became the Oliver House, told next.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.