Denniston & Fellows, and Taylor's Field: the near south side

1854 — 1893, and after

The city's near south side was platted in three campaigns over forty years: the middle of it first — the plat of Joseph Fellows and Hugh Denniston, laid out in 1854 between Fellows Street and Carroll Street, which a district of thirty-five frame dwellings filled by the time of the 1885 Sanborn map. The Birdsell Manufacturing Company then bought a large tract in the Denniston and Fellows plat and developed a new plat of its own in 1879 — a factory as subdivider, housing its own workforce's ground — and a plat by John Rush, a narrow corridor along each side of South Street at the district's east end, stood by 1885. The west of the ground waited longest because it was one man's field. Lathrop Taylor — the town's co-founder, its first clerk and recorder, its first postmaster — set the land aside for agricultural use and held it as Taylor's Field for the rest of his life; only after his death in 1887 did his heirs plat the former oak barren, in 1893. His son Thaddeus Taylor, who developed the plat with his siblings, built his own house at 531 St. Joseph Street in 1905.

The district the three plats made — about seven blocks, between Monroe Street and Bronson Street, St. Joseph Street and Clinton Street, following South Street — was designated a local historic district under the name Taylor's Field in 1998, and a National Register nomination prepared from the preservation commission's survey carries the plat history as its significance: fine Queen Anne, Free Classic and American Foursquare houses built for high-level employees and owners of local industry, the 1892 Lemon Keen Building at 402 South Street as its neighborhood commercial survivor, and the Salvation Army's 1946 Art Deco quarters at 540 Carroll Street closing the period of significance. It is the clearest case in the city of the rule this section runs on: the neighborhood's name is not a developer's brand but a landowner's biography — the founder's field, kept out of the city for two generations, then filed as lots.

Sources:

1. Taylor's Field Historic District, National Register registration form (Indiana DNR, Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology) — the Denniston & Fellows plat of 1854, the Birdsell plat of 1879, the Rush plat, the heirs' platting of 1893, the 1998 local district — in.gov
2. Historic Preservation Commission of South Bend and St. Joseph County — summary narrative on Taylor's Field