Tippecanoe Place burns · 9 October 1889

1889

The city's grandest house caught fire seven months after it was finished, and the Tribune's same-day account is a disaster record in miniature: "It has been years since South Bend has had so disastrous a fire where mere pecuniary loss is concerned, as the one this morning which destroyed the Clem Studebaker residence, Tippecanoe Place." The fire was discovered by Mrs. Studebaker at about two o'clock in the morning of 9 October 1889. The house — ground broken in the last week of September 1886 and not completed until February 1889, built of Indiana fieldstone with sandstone and granite trim on the bluff where, tradition held, Tippecanoe's council fires once burned — was "practically fireproof from the outside, with its stone walls, tile roof and copper facings," and burned from within: the only fires in the house, the paper reasoned, were under the boilers in the sub-basement and in the kitchen range. The building and its furnishings represented perhaps $300,000 to Studebaker, "on which the insurance was so small as to cut scarcely any figure"; the first estimate to restore the house alone, exclusive of furniture and works of art, was $75,000 at the very lowest. The stone walls stood — "the building, for the walls still stand" — and the restoration was real: ten days after the fire the Studebakers entertained one hundred fifty members of the Pan-American Congress at luncheon in the house after their tour of the city's industries. Tippecanoe Place stands today, a restaurant and the city's best-known address; its 1889 fire is the disaster roster's entry for the mansion era — no lives lost, and a fortune in furnishings gone in a night.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, 9 October 1889, "The Fire of 1889" (as preserved by the Tippecanoe Place Restaurant from the Tribune's account) — the discovery at 2 a.m., the construction dates, the $300,000 value and light insurance, the $75,000 restoration floor, the standing walls, and the Pan-American Congress luncheon ten days later.