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Opened 10 September 1868 – ceased as a hotel about 1876; the building stands
Lead: The second house of the St. Joseph name is the one that survives. The three-story Federal-style brick at 115–117 West Colfax Avenue (the National Register nomination gives 117–119) was built and owned by David Greenawalt of Lebanon, Pennsylvania, and — a distinction Leeper is careful to draw — it was planned expressly as a hotel, not converted to one. Chauncey Nichols opened it on 10 September 1868, with L. H. Packard as his clerk. The keepers followed in quick succession: Barber & Slocum in 1869, E. L. Abbott in 1871, Jerry H. Knight and Henry Galloway in 1872, Galloway alone from 1873 to 1875, and John G. Greenawalt in 1876 — at the close of whose lease, in Leeper's words, the hotel "ceased to exist." The building stood untenanted until about 1880, when Marvin Campbell put his hardware store in it, beginning the long commercial afterlife that preserved it.
The National Register nomination of 1985 carries the building's standing in the city's fabric: it is the oldest extant commercial structure in South Bend and the second-oldest building in its multiple-resource area, listed on 5 June 1985. That a hotel of 1868 should be the city's oldest surviving commercial building says as much about the fires and demolitions in this record as about the building. Its most recent lodging-era chapter is a restaurant's: the LaSalle Grill, which opened in the building in 1991, closed in February 2026 — the date as the trade directories give it, printed at that size.
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.
- National Register of Historic Places nomination, St. Joseph Hotel (listed 5 June 1985).
- Trade directory record for the LaSalle Grill (opened 1991; closed February 2026).