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Opened 1 August 1837 – faded about 1856
Lead: The Washington House occupied the west sixty-two feet of the Washington Block, lot 19 on the north side of Washington Street from Main Street east to the alley — ground bought on 5 February 1833 from Senator Samuel Hanna by Samuel Studebaker and sold on 1 March 1836 to Hiram Rush. The block's west end was fitted up as a hotel and opened on 1 August 1837; the first tavern license for the stand, at the September term of 1837, went to William and Robert Gephart. Andrew Simmons held the license at the March term of 1838, and his wife Alva held the town license — a woman's name on the license of one of the town's first hotels, printed as the record gives it.
The house enters the county's darker record once: on the morning of 3 February 1838 the murderer David Scott breakfasted at the Washington House after killing Joshua Copeland, an episode the Crime account of this record carries at its documented size. The tenancy after the Gepharts runs Gephart & Richmond in September 1838 and Robert Gephart alone in May 1839; then, in Leeper's plain admission, definite data is lacking for some years — the record's own gap, printed as such. Chauncey S. Fassett kept the house about 1844. "Black" John Rush announced his refitted tenancy in The Register of 18 February 1848. Ownership passed on 3 March 1849 to John Grannis and John Hammond, and Hammond, sole owner thereafter, kept it until the house faded out in about 1856 — Leeper ties its end to a beginning: it closed "when the first St. Joseph Hotel was opened."
Sources:
- Timothy E. Howard, A History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), vol. 1, Leeper's hotel reminiscences, read first-hand.
- The Crime account in this record (the Scott–Copeland killing).