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Opened 14 July 1879 – closed 30 April 1898
Lead: The rebuilt block on the northwest corner of Main and Washington, raised after the Christmas Eve fire of 1878, carried a hotel in its upper stories, and the house took its name as a compliment: it was called the Oliver House for James Oliver, the plow maker whose works stood across the river and whose family would build the city's great hotel on this same corner twenty years later. The house formally opened on the evening of 14 July 1879, with Jerry H. Knight and Godfrey E. Knight — the Knight brothers — as proprietors. The Knights kept it nearly ten years. The succession after them reads like a roll of the period's hotel trade: Jones & Cox, J. S. McFarland, W. B. Titus, Phelps & Parsons, "and others," in Leeper's phrase.
The Oliver House closed under S. H. Rice with a supper on 30 April 1898, after nearly nineteen years on the corner. Leeper gives its closing a meaning beyond itself: it "betokened" the new Oliver Hotel — the old house stood down, in the record's own reading, because the Oliver family's full-scale hotel was rising to take its place and its name. The corner had then carried lodging under four names in forty years: the St. Joseph, the Derbin, the National, and the Oliver House. The fifth name is the next century's first entry in this record.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.