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1865 – standing in 1907 as the Windsor Hotel
Lead: South Bend carried the names Lafayette and National on two different hotels apiece, and the record keeps them apart only if the reader does. This entry is the house at the southeast corner of Lafayette and South streets; the other National — the renamed Derbin on the Oliver Hotel's site — is told in the St. Joseph entry below. The Lafayette Avenue house was a one-story frame building when President Whitten — the town's hotel investor of the period, father of the city engineer William M. Whitten — bought it from George Knoblock on 13 July 1865. Whitten enlarged it to two stories and opened it in December 1865 as the National Hotel, in partnership with his son-in-law Thomas J. Slick. Sarah A. Matthews bought a part interest on 28 July 1868 for five thousand dollars, and Whitten & Matthews kept the house until 1874, when L. H. Packard — a name that recurs across this whole record — took it.
Fire, the period's usual editor, reached the house in 1877: it was partly destroyed, rebuilt at three stories, and rechristened the St. James. Under that name its proprietors ran Faulknor, 1881 to 1885, and Byron J. McElrath until 18 May 1888, when Louis Pfeiffer bought the house, refurnished it, and stayed. By 1907, when Leeper wrote, it traded as the Windsor Hotel.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.