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1840 – the LaSalle Hotel rose on the site in 1921
Lead: The southwest corner of Michigan Street and LaSalle Avenue — Water Street, in the first naming — was the town's original heart: the first ferry crossed there, and Alexis Coquillard's "Big St. Joseph's Station" trading post stood there. In 1840 William L. Earl, the Michigan Hotel's licensee of 1834, erected a hotel on the corner. Its names in course map the century's lodging fashions: the Exchange first — it was Benj. R. Hall "of the Exchange" who organized the rate combination of 1837, before this building rose, the name evidently traveling with the trade — then the Gibbs House, the Dwight House, and the Sheridan House, a name Samuel Ragan gave it for General Sheridan. Enlarged, it traded as the New Sheridan. Bird Bickford took the house in 1895, and after his death his family kept it. Leeper, writing in 1907, closes its account with the period's own satisfaction: it had "prospered to this day" and was "an excellent hotel."
The corner's hotel story did not end with the frame house. In 1921 the LaSalle Hotel rose on this site, told in its own entry below — so that the intersection of Michigan and LaSalle has lodged travelers, under one roof or another, from 1840 to the present, the Sheridan's ground passing directly to the LaSalle and the LaSalle's building standing today as apartments. No closing date for the Sheridan itself is carried in the record reached beyond its succession by the LaSalle's construction; the demolition is implied by the building that replaced it, and is printed no more strongly than that.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.
- National Register nomination, LaSalle Hotel (the site succession).