Hi, I'm Angie Quinn, executive director of ARCH, Fort Wayne's historic preservation organization.

And I'm Bob Zahrt, the architectural history instructor at IPFW.

Over the next hour, we're going to take you on a tour of houses in and around Fort Wayne.

We're going to talk about their history and also about their architecture and design details.

The Chief Richardville House is just off of Bluffton Road on the southwest side of Fort Wayne.

It was built in 1827, making this the oldest surviving building in Allen County.

This is a federal style house with Greek revival elements like the doors around.

You can see it had a porch added to it at one time, which has since been removed.

The house is currently under the care of the Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society, and they've had the house for about 11 years now.

Yes.

And the current restoration effort concerns the stucco on the house.

This is a brick structure and there were other examples of houses like it in the area.

So they have some idea as to what it looked like originally.

They think that the stucco was put on the house around 1915, and they're in the process of removing it so that the house will look as it did when it was the home of Chief Richardville.

After we took a look around, we met with Randy Elliott of the History Center to find out more about Chief Richardville and this house.

Randy, we looked at the outside of the house and we got a little sense of the Greek revival style.

The fireplace is the most outstanding part interior.

And this was the rage.

This was the style when this house was built.

Can you tell us a little bit about when it was built and how it was built and that sort of thing?

It was built in 1827.

It was a treaty house.

One of the provisions of the Treaty of 1826 was to build nine houses for the Miami Chiefs to this area.

And this was one of the ones that was built.

Was this the same size all of them were built?

No, this is much more elaborate than the others.

The idea of a small two room brick structures, it is very grand for its time period.

This has four rooms downstairs and two up.

Right.

That's a much larger house.

Yes, it is much larger, more, much more elaborate.

Now, I know that Richardville had some money sort of above and beyond what you'd expect a normal person to have anywhere in Indiana during the time period here.

If I get this right, he was like a nephew of Chief Little Turtle and he became this civil chief of the Miami nation.

His mother was Tacumwah, and I think he became chief right around 1815.

So he had actually been in charge of the local Miami for a few years before this house was built.

And he lived to 1841.

And when he died, he had personally over $200,000 just in gold and silver alone.

He was the wealthiest man in Indiana, wasn't he?

We believe.

Well, what's that?

What's this house going to be used for in the future?

We hope to have it as a historic site to be restored and used as a site here in north eastern Indiana to perpetuate the Miami culture and customs of the time period.

It's really a wonderful location.

Oh, yes.

The vista, the view out the front house is water.

in the Greek-revival style.

I noticed on the outside the roof has changed.

What kind of alterations have been made to the outside of the building to bring it to its present?

We believe that in the mid-teens in 1915 or so, there were extensive renovations to house that the sort of a Craftsman style with a stucco going on the exterior, changes in a windows and doors and so on.

But nothing really major.

The bulk of the house has remained remarkably intact.

This particular room has a number of changes to it.

One, of course, is a fireplace surround.

You can see how the modern brick has been added.

The shallowness has been removed and they've made it much more deep than what it was originally.

That's one of the things that's fascinating when you see the other fireplace is such a shallow fireplace, it almost looks artificial.

Right.

We thought at the time it would throw more heat up to the room.

So this one was made much larger and they thought, well, this will be more modern for this style of time.

What kind of other features are going to be distinctive in the House?

What will people look for when they come?

This one is quite evident when you come to the front door, there's a great staircase has come in, which is walnut, and that's believed to be original to the house, the winding type of staircase.

It's very typical.

The style house closets.

There are some closets in this house which are unusual for this time period.

Upstairs in the bedrooms, for instance, there are two closets flanking the fireplace, and they're very shallow people coming here.

So why are they so shallow?

Well, at that time, they didn't have as many clothes as what we do today.

And people would fold their clothes up and put them on the shelves.

You wouldn't have a hanging tile system as you do today.

I think that's very fascinating.

We tend to we live in a consumer age, so we have bigger, deeper, huger closets, right?

These look very, very.

Almost insufficient.

Right.

Right.

Very austere type of arrangement.

But it was very uncommon to have that type of arrangement here in this house.

What about the woodwork around the doors and the windows?

It's very wide, very thick.

The windows themselves are very deep.

Obviously, because the house is several bricks thick.

Can you talk tell us a little.

Right.

Walls are very thick in this house.

And part of the thinking is that they were built that way to incorporate some more detailing so that the windows are more impressive.

And the present visitors that came out from Fort Wayne to visit Chief Richardville and be entertained by and it really does carry that that dignity that you get in this Greek revival.

It's a very impressive.

Yes.

The structure I think the when I've read about the house, too, is after it was built, Richardville spared no expense with furnishing the house as well.

And the other expensive oriental rugs that were imported and the furnishings to give himself what really was the grandest house in the entire area.

Apparently, when dignitaries came to Fort Wayne, if they were going to be kept in style, they came at some point to the Richardville house because this was the house.

This was described as very French interior design.

And with everything rich in proportions.

Angie, this is terrific.

We are in a house that is just ten years out from the Richardville house, the Vermilyea house out here on U.S. 24.

And within a stone's throw of the old canal.

You know, it's amazing, what ten years and community history over that ten years really made a difference in terms of how styles the size and frankly, the magnificence.

You know, the Richardville house was the grandest house.

By 1839, there were many other brick houses built on a grand scale, not only in Fort Wayne, but way out here out of Fort Wayne as well.

We're almost to Roanoke at this point.

Yes, This is a much larger house in every dimension and its furnishings are absolutely magnificent.

This fireplace is so typical, this massive federal piece that is original to the house in fine wood.

And then right next to it, the postal station... That's right.

...for this part of the county.

The woodwork in this house actually has a lot of stories besides the fact that this is black walnut, which is in most of the original parts of the house.

There's some butternut up in what used to be the master bedroom, but one of the doors has a bullet in it.

Really?

Yeah.

Big, thick door with a bullet hole right in the middle.

So this house saw a lot of activity.

Jesse Vermilyea, the person who built this house along with his wife, Maria, came here in 1833.

And Jesse Vermilyea not only helped to survey the canal and then continue to to operate, sold them store goods here and became the postmaster of Aboite when this was still a small community far from Fort Wayne.

The canal itself runs along through the property or used to when Vermilyea owned all of the land.

Of course, it's across the road now.

You know, there was one of the locks also that allowed people to go from Fort Wayne and continue going down in terms of elevation to get to to the Ohio River.

Vermilyea and his wife were really amazing people.

He not only was very involved, he farmed, he had a sawmill and he took a trip to Canada in the 1840s, saw plank roads and came back and said, you know, we've got to build some better roads to Fort Wayne.

So it was because of Jesse Vermilyea that we had the Lima Plank Road built and then our other built plank roads came along after like the Bluffton plank and Fort Wayne became a transportation hub because of the canal and because of the plank roads.

So we have Jesse to thank for that.

One of the things that's really fascinating about local history is that we have that aspect that 150 years ago, Fort Wayne was very much a frontier city by the forge and plank road and all of the canals and all that and that.

At the same time, we've got the sophistication of the federal style.

Federal, of course, being a vernacular or a local version of the kind of architecture that was popular at the founding of our country and what Americans saw as the national style at that time.

So here, way out at the edge of the country, what was the Wild West are houses like this.

Angie, This is Jesse Vermilyea.

Why don't you tell me about the portrait here and of his wife in the other part?

Well, this portrait and the portrait of Maria McTaggart Vermilyea that is in the other parlor, both were originally done by Horace Rockwell, who was a well-known portraitist that came through Fort Wayne in the 1830s and forties and did some of the nicest portraits for some of the very wealthy families.

The original portraits, though, by Rockwell, are sitting at the Allen County Fort Wayne Historical Society in their collection and the reproduction that was done by a woman whose last name was Ascousa are here at the house.

There's another portrait in the smaller parlor, and that was of Jesse Vermilyea, who became Jesse Vermilyea Bond.

She was actually the daughter named after her father.

The Vermilyeas died very early on after the construction of the house.

Jesse himself died of cholera in 1846.

His wife died in 1849.

And then their children, their surviving children, went to live with other people.

I think two children went to live with Hugh McCulloch and then two others went to live with family down in Grant County.

So the house then sort of fell into a period of no one really owned it.

And during that time, a gentleman named Philo Rumsey came in and he actually ran this as an inn.

It was a hotel on the canal.

And it was probably during that time, although we don't know for sure that all the oral tradition about the Underground Railroad comes into place.

Looking at this house from the outside, it is really amazing, isn't it?

It is.

It is an astonishing house.

It stretched out along the hill, but you can see the original building blocks, the two sections of the original house side by side.

One's a three bay unit.

And then to the right of that is a four bay unit that's just a little smaller, a little lower with a story and a half right.

That's the part of the house that the Darlings saw when they bought the house in the 1940s.

They were the ones who really saved the house and had sat empty for a number of years.

Windows had been broken out, but they really put their hearts into it and started out by the addition.

That is, as you're looking at it from Redding, the one that's the farthest to the left was something that they had done, and it was very sympathetic.

That's what really is impressive because you've got this wonderful, old, stable center part of the house, very strong and federal in its feel.

And yet every addition since then has it has has really built on that original core.

Yeah.

And the Darlings, it had paid good attention to details, actually, I have to tell you about them.

They're a fun story themselves.

Earl MacGregor Darling, and his wife Olive, moved here.

He was an executive for his Zollner Pistons.

And while they were working on the house, they also during World War Two, because there was a shortage of so many things, Mrs.

Darling invented plastic tweezers, and they actually manufactured them here on the lot.

What a great story.

I know.

What a great story.

So the Darlings, though, again, that attention to detail, they really brought the House back.

They did that addition.

But it was it was little details that we were talking about, like moving the front of the house from one side to the other.

Sure.

When the Upper Huntington Road, which is U.S. 24 today, when they actually four laned it, they actually moved it and the house used to face US 24, which is now Redding Road.

And when they put it on the other side of the house, the owners in the forties, the Darlings, changed the front door.

So there's two front entrances, one the much earlier one and the one that was built to accommodate modern, modern travel.

Yes.

And the new one is much more impressive in scale.

It's very much we mentioned the plantation look, you know, with the very large columns.

So that can be seen and appreciated from the distance from here to the highway.

There's another addition that's just been done in the last year by the current homeowners.

And it's very beautiful.

One of the things that I really liked when we were going through the addition is that it's not put together using contemporary wall widths.

For example, everything feels like it.

It could be old.

I mean, the walls are a foot thick and the doors replicate the paneling you see on the doors in this part of the house and the windows have those deep recesses, right.

And so it's very sympathetic.

And it works as a whole.

Right.

Because part of restoration is is being able to do new construction that's in keeping with the historic parts of the building.

And in this case, they did a fine job of that.

And don't you love that the garages that are an essential part of modern life, we can't get along without our cars or vehicles.

The garage wing is turned away slightly.

So when you're coming up from the old approach, the old historic approach, you don't really see it.

Look, it's just it's part of the house.

It's attached to the house like we all want our garages to be today.

But you don't sense the garage first as you come up to the house.

And they did a nice job on that design.

Absolutely.

Well, here we are in West Central and it's terrific.

West Central is one of my favorite places in Fort Wayne.

And, you know, we all think about West Central's glorious Victorian homes, the mansions, the turrets, all the wonderful details.

And, you know, this house doesn't have hardly any of them.

No, it doesn't.

And yet it's such an interesting building.

We have a date for the house.

You know, we don't have a for sure date.

Our guesstimate is always right around 1840.

I think one of the most fascinating things about this house is that it's oriented away from the street.

Yeah.

And we don't really know for sure why it's possible that either it's because it preceded the planning of the neighborhood and it was just a house or a tenement house or, you know, something for someone on the farm or it was possibly built to match another house that would have faced it coming the same way on the street.

Now, we really don't know.

It's one of the things that makes this house so intriguing is it gives us little pieces, but not not the whole story.

Absolutely.

And it's a gracious little building.

I've driven by this hundreds of times.

And it wasn't until now that I really stopped to take a look at it.

And it's it the proportions are fine.

It's solid.

It just has a lot of dignity that probably reflects part of a Greek revival roots.

But at the same time, it's a very functional down to earth kind of building.

Sure.

Now it's nowhere as fine as the Richardville House or the Vermilyea House that we've just seen.

But at the same time, the house is in that same category in the 1830s.

Most of the things being built in Fort Wayne were framed.

So the fact that it was brick is pretty, pretty substantial.

It's a great building and it really is a building that tells us about early Fort Wayne and early West Central.

At the time this house was built West Central was a farm and it was only then being developed into the neighborhood and the the person who was building the neighborhood, William Rockhill, was building all sorts of things at the same time.

He built during the same time a treaty house for Chief Godfroy down in Blackford County that he built of brick.

He built his own house just two blocks down on Van Buren Street of brick, very similar to this house.

He built this house.

And then he also had a contract for part of the canal.

Actually, the section between here and the Vermilyea House.

And he got this crazy idea that the canal would bring millions of people to town who would need hotel space.

So in 1839, at the same time he built this, he also started building what became a very large deluxe hotel called the Rockhill House.

Oh, yeah.

It took him 20 years to build it only was in business for ten years, and then it became Saint Joe Hospital.

Oh, that's that's fascinating.

Now, when we're looking at this house, are we going to be seeing something here that we will see a lot of other examples of that in Fort Wayne?

Or is this generation of building mostly history now?

This is mostly gone.

There's a few examples in downtown, just a handful.

But for West Central neighborhood, this is a real early precursor of some of the other working class cottages that appear more on the on the south end of the West Central neighborhood like Wilt and Lavina Streets.

But this house itself really is very much earlier and very much more primitive in a way than any of those houses.

The style is Greek...is Holland parlor, and when we go inside, we'll see that.

Yes, I think that's very exciting.

Yeah.

The restoration work that our is doing now, how much of the original look has been restored and how much is not going to be restored or what what can we what can we know about what the house probably looked at just from looking at the evidence out here.

The two doors to the house are original doors.

We've just had them repaired, but we had to find new windows because we had the two garage doors on the outside.

And that is how this house was saved.

We saved because it was it was part and reused as a garage, something functional in about 1910.

So people lived in the house very early on, but by 1910, larger houses had been built in West Central neighborhood.

And this house, this little house on the back of this lot became someone's place for her, for their car.

Sure, sure.

Why don't we go inside?

Let's go inside.

You know, one of the things that I just love about this house is the fireplace.

And it tells us so much about the house itself.

What I love about it its so Greek Revival, it's got to be part of the evidence that the whole house was a more complete Greek revival than what we're seeing outside now.

Yeah.

And I think a little bit more substantial then than the sense you get.

You know, it's real similar to the one that we saw at the Vermilyea House and the one we saw at the Richardville house.

Again, during the time period.

The Greek revival was the most predominant style.

One of the things that was just amazing about this House, though, is it was used as a garage.

And so we had a car in this room, which was the parlor.

We had a car in the room next to this, which was the hall, and this wall luckily remained in between.

It's the thing that gave us the clues to the fact that this was a house.

One of the things we found being used to repair the floor was the mantel piece and when we're all done, we're going to be able to put it back based on the shadow on the piece off and used it to repair the floor.

Yeah.

And then drove the cars over it.

So were lucky you have the artifact at all.

We're really lucky to have it and it gives us lots of clues.

It's got the paint, different colors on it, that sort of thing as well.

So, you know, one of the things that people I think expected, though, was to see that there would be a fireplace in here.

We've got a fireplace surround.

I would have thought that, too, for a house of this era.

But it doesn't.

And obviously the stove and the dimensions, the room are small, about 12 feet by 15.

So this would have been a fairly good sized home for the era, but by our standards, very, very small, very intimate.

So small, intimate parties.

Now, imagine the cars coming through this room, though, because, you know, we've got this wall here with the window, but you can see where Arch, we had to do a repair, take the garage doors off of the building and actually find bricks to match fine mortar to match and have new windows built to replace what we thought was here, we had two guest dimensions even, and we found this piece that actually had been part of the window frame trim.

And using that, we were able to come up with how big the window should be.

How did we know how many windows the house had here since the garage had pretty much destroyed?

There's some real early pictures of Fort Wayne that were drawn.

They were sort of birdseye maps of the city or someone imagining themselves up in the air looking down.

And this building shows up.

Oh, just very clearly with the two windows.

And then we get a sense of the size from the other windows in the house, right?

We were able to do the length of it from that.

So yeah.

Now this is a hall and parlor house means that it's essentially two rooms on the grounds, one of the rooms being a parlor - the fancy room - will receive guests.

The surround and heat source, and then the room that is next door is a slightly smaller room that would have been used for all other family.

Right.

The other room has basically the opening to the stairwell.

It has a small closet under the stairs and then a cupboard that was built next to where another wood burning stove would have been for the cooking and all that sort of thing.

And that's a much darker room and only has one window in it.

Right, Right.

And that's, that's all there ever was.

So, so far as we can tell, there might have been an earlier door that had been walled up long ago.

So but, you know, again, this is the parlor.

And you can tell just by things like the wallpaper.

Yes.

It's just amazing.

Never seen this before.

This is wonderful.

Well, there are altogether about seven layers of wallpaper in this room.

The blue and white is the earliest, and it goes through some sort of East lake and some sort of late Victorian.

And the last layer actually is a deep, dark sort of burgundy sort of high style queen.

And so even though it's a very simple house, this was the fancy room.

The fancy room.

The color is interesting.

The color values from the, the pale blue and then to the to the almost a forest green with gold.

Mm.

And then the last one to a real rich, real rich burgundy.

And you know, again if you, if then you look at the different colors that are on the fireplace, you'll see trim colors that match the early wallpaper, the earliest of three light gray sort of dove color goes with that blue and white and, you know, and so forth until we finally get to this deep, dark, rich brown, which would have gone with the burgundy wallpaper, which was the last used in the house before it became a home for garage, you know, for cars and sort of for people.

Now, this is a two story house.

So there there was a stairway going upstairs to say, we're going upstairs.

What what kind of rooms do we have upstairs?

Upstairs?

There are three bedrooms, which was sort of surprising.

There's two smaller bedrooms above the parlor and a larger one above the hall that even has a closet, really, which is kind of impressive for the time.

Unusual building of this at that time period.

Right.

Again, most Holland parlor houses were much simpler.

And you even would have seen people using this room and the hall room for sleeping central house by today's standards, simple house by West Central standard, but a very fine, upstanding house from 1840.

We're at the landmark Philo T. Farnsworth House, at the corner of East State Boulevard and Saint Joe Boulevard.

This is perhaps one of the best recognized houses in the whole city.

It's right across from North Side Park and Park Center, and it's what is known as a Craftsman style house.

This house was built about 1905, and it shows a lot of the early craftsman elements.

Now, this house is very interesting.

The portion we're standing in now is actually in addition and it was added on to the original rectangle of the house.

We don't know when probably in the late twenties perhaps.

Might have been originally.

And then I think they did it, redid it again a few years later.

Not sure, though, but it fits very well.

It looks like it's part of the original design, doesn't it?

And I think part of it is because of these windows from outside, they're the same size and shape of other windows that you see kind of in rows along both the first floor and the second floor.

This house is very large.

And that's characteristic of craftsman houses.

They're big houses that look like they're very simply made, hence the name Craftsman.

And when you get inside, they're just huge.

The spaces are very large.

They flow into one another and they have characteristics like this vast amount of light that we're seeing in this house today.

But this is more than just a craftsman house.

This has a local architectural connection, doesn't it?

It does.

The house, we believe, was built for Dan Ninde, who was an attorney here in town and actually one of the founders of Lincoln Life, right around 1905 or so, we think.

He had his sister in law design the house for him.

Now, Dan's sister in law was a woman named Joel Ninde, and she was designing houses for friends.

In about 1910 or so.

She convinced her husband, and Dan Ninde, and another friend of theirs, a woman named Grace Crosby, to go into business.

And they opened the Wildwood Builders.

And this house is, we think, one of Joel's earliest houses.

What are some of the ways you can identify it as a Joel Ninde house?

Well, one of the things that you notice is that even though it has a State Street address, the orientation really isn't toward State Street.

It's more to the side.

There's two porches along the Saint Joseph Boulevard side of the house.

There are a series of windows and French doors opening into a wonderful private yard on the west side of the house.

The west side of the house.

Yes, towards the river.

And this was out in the suburbs, then basically the edge of the city was back then.

Out in the suburbs.

State Boulevard was still known as the Hicksville State Road.

And you went over it by a little bitty one, one lane bridge down by where North Side High School is Now.

The Craftsman House has many really interesting features.

One of the things I love about this house is that when you go up the stairway, you you come into that cross hall that is filled with storage spaces.

I, I really was amazed by seeing that I a woman looking at that just knows that a woman had to have designed that there is storage for everything.

The whole wall is covered space.

Did you notice that there's a door that you open and that takes you yet into another space where the attic is And then in the little passageway there's drawers and shelves and they all have little labels on them, very organized storage unit.

The things that she brought in were, you know, clean lines, rooms that you can see, rooms that you can clean, conveniently located kitchens next to dining rooms instead sort of, you know, down at the other end of the house.

Yes, that's important.

Being able to move from one part of the house to another without wasting a lot of space on hallways and unnecessary passageways and this house has all those elements.

This house has it.

You can actually the house is almost in two halves and you can almost walk continuously from room to room on either half of the house and very easily then walk from a room into another place.

And you don't have as many corners to go through.

You know, it's just it's just a very straight shot.

And I think that's probably one of the very modern things that she put in this house.

She was designing, you know, at a time when women weren't doing this.

And her houses always have that that flavor.

Now, like I said, Dan Ninde had been one of the original organizing members of Lincoln Life and early on, he ended up selling this house to another person very involved with the early story of Lincoln, and that was Franklin Mead.

Mead came to Fort Wayne to basically start the actuary part of Lincoln Life.

Now, I don't know a lot about life insurance, but it's my understanding that actuaries are the people who calculate the risk.

And for an insurance company to actually grow, they needed to do that very well.

And so Mead was a real important part of the beginning years of Lincoln.

He also he liked to garden - gentleman's hobby, and he grew wonderful peonies here and wonderful irises.

And he gave a number of starts to the Fort Wayne Parks Department for their gardens.

And after his death, sort of in memory of him, his family donated some money and a number of plantings for what was then to be a new garden for the city in Foster Park.

And today, if you go to those wonderful Foster Park Gardens, you'll find a wishing well that's dedicated to Franklin Mead.

I walked by that well, thousands of times, and I've never known that history.

That's fascinating.

That is, why don't we walk through the house and get to get a sense of how big it is?

Angie, we've moved into the living room.

Isn't this a splendid big space?

It's a big space.

It's an open space.

And even though it's the formal parlor, there's there's some informality about it that I really like.

And I think probably by 1905 or 1910, a parlor would have been renamed the Living room.

Right?

So it has that more modern connotation of less less formal, less stuffy kind of gathering space.

Yeah.

And I think with other things in this house, the detail in here, the woodwork molding, things like that, they are simpler there.

They are more craftsman feeling than Victorian feel.

And again, there's just an ease and simplicity about this house.

It it made it a modern house for its time.

It certainly did.

I loved it.

This room has four sets of doorways.

There's two sets of French doors just leading into the parlor.

An additional door that leads out onto the front porch, and then the French doors leading onto the backyard and terrace.

That are flanked by large windows themselves.

So you get a sense that this room really is part of the outdoors.

I'll bet this was a great place for kids.

It had to have been, you know, besides that, the front entrance is the formal entrance on State Street, the stately State Street entrance, so to speak.

That's right.

There are there are entries from the kitchen and another entry from a back, almost like a mudroom sort of porch that probably would have been had they been my kids, where they would have entered and come into the rest of the house.

And I think those porches are probably what most people would identify as the the the catch the signature for this house as they're driving by it.

I think you see the porches first.

Yeah.

Inside here on the first floor.

Besides this living room, there's another room probably was originally the den, a beautiful red room and a formal dining room.

And again, entries from many angles.

So the house has so much circulation and it really is easy to get from one part to another.

Yes, I started counting the windows and the doorways and I lost count it at a certain point.

The house has so many of them.

One of the things I like upstairs, in addition to that wonderful closet space that you just thought was wonderful, are the bedrooms because they have built in cross ventilation lots of windows on every side of the room so that the house opens up up here on this hill and would have had cross ventilation any time of year.

They also have some modern features, again, that I like the closets I would die for in my own house.

The two main bedrooms have separate dressing rooms that were separated with French doors.

Yes.

And they have built in shelves.

They have a built in closet and much natural light.

So you could dress all your clothes would be away from the actual bedroom itself.

And then the master bedroom also has a sleeping porch, which is something you always see on a good house from the time period here in Fort Wayne.

Oh, I can still remember a sleeping porch from my grandmother's home down in Williams Woodland.

And we in the summertime, it was the place where everybody slept.

Everybody just went out and slept out there surrounded by the treetops.

Both the main bedrooms also have their own bathroom, which is not a feature you would expect to see in a house of this time period.

There's actually another full bathroom down here on the first floor for the maid and her separate area.

And that is just it's more restrooms than anyone would have put into a house at that time period.

And did you notice the the little sink in the master bedroom?

I don't understand that.

And I think I've never seen one quite like it.

I think we have to do some more research to find out what its original uses for.

The current homeowner thinks that it's a great place to shave.

Yes.

You know, Angie, I feel so honored to be in this home.

I grew up remembering having one of the first TVs in Fort Wayne, and you and I are both very much children of the television age.

So here we are we are in the home of the man who invented television.

Yes, it is.

It is almost a goosebump sort of sensation.

Philo Farnsworth, who who bought the house in 1948, I believe, had moved to Fort Wayne in the 1930s to buy Capehart, which was making jukeboxes and radios and that sort of thing, and actually started making TVs here in Fort Wayne.

I think probably a lot of people remember some of those early Farnsworth TVs.

But again, to be here is amazing.

I think it was even more amazing that we had the chance to talk to Philo Farnsworth wife Pem Farnsworth, who is still here in Fort Wayne.

We were looking for a house that had three bedrooms and a room for Phils study and more than one bath.

And we looked at all the beautiful big homes on Forest Park and everywhere, and not one had more than one bath.

So we found this Mead house and it had three and a half baths and a study for Phil and see they had two, three, four bedrooms.

So even though it was closer in than we would have liked and we chose to buy that and we enjoyed it very much when we bought the place, it had lilacs on the street side and then the south side and everything from white to very deep color.

And I love those.

Anyway, Mr. Mead had been a horticultural colorist and the place was just full.

The ground is full of bulbs and we didn't know what was Coming up next, the lower Allen Lee in the summertime we had badminton out there and in the wintertime when winter he flooded it so he'd have a skating rink.

When Kent started to school and he came home crying and he said, “They won't believe that my dad invented television because I'm the only one in school that doesn't have a TV.” So at that time, the first one of the nearest broadcast was in Michigan, and you had to have a fair sized antenna to bring it in.

So Phil had a big antenna, put it on the roof, and we got a TV.

And and Phil says, Now I'm not a repairman.

If you if something goes wrong, call repairman.

And well, something went wrong one day.

And Kent loved there was a science program and two or three right after school he hurried home just to see and Monday, it didn't work.

Well, I had called a repairman, but he hadn't come yet.

And I was in the study and I heard the TV on and I came in and I said, What happened?

What you did to it?

He said, Oh, I just got behind and did some things.

And then that Phil took the part that was on the left of the driveway.

He said, That's mine.

It was in Weeds.

He says, That's my Rose Garden and I like things that I can like, bulbs I can plant, forget.

But the next June 1st, he got his first rose and he came in and he said, That's why I wanted roses So I could bring you a fresh rose every morning.

So you see, he was quite romantic.

Before he'd said at times, I'm sorry I had anything to do with it.

He died in 71, and I don't know whether you're aware that the way we saw that picture from the moon, it was a miniaturized camera tube of his with a section of electron multiplier on it to give it power.

And that's how we saw the pictures from the moon.

And when we saw that, he said, Pem, this has made it all worthwhile.

What a great life she has lived.

With great stories, too.

She's an outstanding woman, and the stories about this house were just so much fun.

I think you could stay there forever because of his connection to television.

But I think it's time for us to move on.

Craftsman style houses are only one of two lines in modern architecture.

The other one is the Prairie style.

And that's what we're going to go see next Were here on Forest Park Boulevard, Bob.

Absolutely.

We are at the Franke House, one of the best known houses in all of Fort Wayne.

But, you know, I think this is also the house that has the most misconceptions about it.

Certainly does.

Most people in Fort Wayne believe that this house was built by Frank Lloyd Wright, but actually it wasn't.

It shows his stylistic signature and his influences, but it was designed by someone else.

That's right.

The house was actually designed by both Walter Burley Griffin and Barry Byrd, and it was commissioned at the time when the Prairie style was at its height of popularity.

So what about this house looks like Prairie style, Bob?

Well, Prairie style is indicated by an emphasis on the horizontal.

So you'll notice that the house sits on a very marked pedestal or base.

Also, there's a clear distinction between each floor level.

So the horizontal emphasis is very clear all the way throughout.

And then the roofline is very wide and very flat.

It overhangs, providing a kind of sheltering umbrella for the whole house.

I've heard that it's called Prairie because it sort of mimics the wide open space.

Correct.

of prairie.

And, you know, I think actually we'll see some of that wide open space when we go inside as well.

And there are lots of prairie style houses in Fort Wayne and one form or the other.

This is a high style version of that.

Right.

You know, John Bohn Franke, the person who had the building designed, gave Fort Wayne two really wonderful, unique gifts.

One, of course, most people don't know about is Mr. Franke started and owned what became Perfection Bakeries.

And so Mr. Franke gave us that wonderful aroma of fresh baked bread downtown and also the endless bread that everlasting loaf of bread.

That's one of the icons of the city.

It truly is.

The other things I think more people do know about, though, is the fact that the Franke family gave the major portion of the donation of land that became Franke Park.

And you know, the parks were important to Franke.

He also has another tie to Fort Wayne.

And right after we brought in Adolph Jaenicke, the city superintendent of Parks, he actually hired Jaenicke to do the landscaping for this property that went on.

Oh, that's fascinating.

I, I love when connections like this resurface because it makes the tapestry that is Fort Wayne history so much more interesting.

Indeed.

Let's take a look at this house.

Well, here we are in this wonderful house.

So what do you think?

It's amazing.

One of the things that I love about Prairie style is, is the wide open spaces.

You don't expect to see that in a house this early.

It's well before, you know, modern open plans.

But we have it here.

It has it definitely has that feel of being more than the sum of its parts.

And that's one of the characteristics of Prairie, is that you have wonderful spaces that flow one into the other.

Your visual line is forever, you know.

And prairie style, again, it it's called that because it mimics the wide openness of the Midwestern geography, but then it also brings the geography inside because you have wonderful large windows that bring the outside into the room.

It's just this is a great space.

It is.

And there's a wonderful story about these windows.

You know, this house has an organ built into it.

And Mr. Franke used to play the organ and open the windows off the front, and the neighbors would come with their picnic lunches and sit on the yard and listen to his concerts.

That's an amazing thing.

I don't think that happens much in Fort Wayne these days.

Probably not.

But it's a great it's a great part of the history of this house.

There's some other amazing things inside of this house.

The architects not only spent the time developing the plan for the building, but they also thought out what the interior would be like.

And they actually planned that at the furnishings for them as well.

Yes.

And there are several pieces in this house that are part of the original plan for the furnishings.

Behind us is a table, a wonderful table.

Wouldn't you love to take that home with you that was found in the garage when the house was acquired?

Massive, big table that it's a sculpted piece, not just assembled the dining room table with its four chairs.

That creates a secluded space.

A room within a room is another one of those pieces that are original.

And then not only did Barry Byrd and Walter Burley Griffin spend the time on the on the building, they also worked with an interior designer, Alfonso Iannelli, and he did some other of the interior things in the house, including the mural that's over the fireplace.

I think we should go take a look at that.

Yes, let's do that.

Here we are, Angie, at the hearth.

It's the center and the heart of the whole house.

And even though it's a very intimate thing in terms of the family gathers here at this spot, the architect had his hands on this, too.

He hired Alfonso Iannelli to commission.

It, had him do it, this painting for this particular room, and it's called the Tree of Life.

And apparently after it was installed shortly after the house was constructed, Mrs. Franke decided she didn't like it.

And now the story, whether it's true or not, is that she didn't like the nudes.

And so clothing has since been painted on that.

That's a very interesting story about the painting.

And even if it isn't true, it should be indeed.

When you see the the fireplace, I think is a very interesting, complex unit.

And it shows us a lot of the history of the building.

This mantel surround, for example, is not part of the original design.

There was a fire here probably during World War Two with some damage done to the lower part of the painting and some smoke damage to the stone.

And so that was replaced with this.

And that accounts for this amended decorative element right there.

Tell me about these mortar joints.

Oh, I'm glad you noticed that.

I think that's really one of the most fun, fascinating parts about prairie.

The mortar is inset half an inch, and that creates a shadow and emphasizes the horizontal.

But at the same time, the mortar between the joints of the bricks is flush with the front of the brick.

Yet you realize standing back from it, what you see are the lines going this way.

MM And again, even though this is a tall vertical piece, but what you get is wide.

Yes, it's flat.

There's a real feel of ornament about a house like this.

Even something as simple as a blind that sort of blocks view from the living room area up into the personal space.

Even that is an architectural feature of this building.

Yes.

And these are distinctive because you can see through them they emit light and yet they create part of that texture that makes this house, even though it's huge, very, very intimate and very nice.

I think that one of the fascinating things is that this style never really passed into history.

Now it didn't it kind of grew into some of the four squares that you see all over Fort Wayne today and also went into the style that I think we all recognize, which is perhaps and that brings us full circle, because the only place I have in place is the ranch style.

One of the Usonian.

Yes.

Southwest here in Fort Wayne.

So we have quite a quite a heritage of modern architecture in Fort Wayne that makes this with all the other styles that we that we've looked at.

It actually does span 1914, the time for this House all the way up to.

I feel like we're on a bridge to a tree house, Bob.

I think that's a wonderful image because in many ways we really are.

We're in Forest Ridge development.

We're southwest of Fort Wayne, just off U.S. 24, and we are at the Hanselmann House.

Right.

And it is located in a heavily wooded part of the of the part of the county.

And the bridge with its stairway acts as a as a transition from the wooded natural environment into this splendid modern home.

You know, this house is probably one of the most sophisticated houses in the state of Indiana.

And it's it's one of the signature pieces of Michael Graves for he was the architect that designed it.

He's an Indiana artist, too.

He's an Indiana artist born and raised in the state.

And that is how this house came to be built here.

He went to high school with the people who built this house.

Oh, that's a good connection.

I always wondered how we got to Michael Graves house here in Fort Wayne.

Right.

So shortly after Michael Graves actually completed his coursework and was trying to find jobs as an architect, he ran into one of his former classmates and she said, we're needing a house.

Design this house for us.

This is actually Michael Graves first commission, his very first one, his very first commission.

Now, you know, Michael Graves is, of course, gone on to other things.

He's been part of the New York five in terms of modern architecture.

He is designing hotels around the world, and its products are actually available at a discount department store locally so people can find Michael Graves designs for their own homes.

I think I have one of his teapots from that very store.

I think I have one, too.

Let's go inside.

This space is different than any other that we've seen.

And the other houses in Fort Wayne.

I agree.

And I was surprised because I expected to be overwhelmed by the interior space.

It's it's a large space.

It's an international style house.

Yet there's intimacy.

Oh, it's wonderfully intimate.

We're standing in the living room, which is a full two story high.

And yet I feel like I'm I'm part of a very intimate kind of space.

This house hugs you, so to speak.

Yet at the same time, it does the same thing that the Franke House did.

It's bringing the outdoors in and we do get visitors from room to room.

Yes, Graves did a wonderful job with this house.

It's essentially a cube and the front half of the cube has been exploded with a series of windows and angles that that takes you out of that cube.

So you're in a protected space, and yet you're also very open and outward.

It's an architecturally adventurous design, and I think it's also adventurous as the Hanselmanns built it.

It's my understanding that they actually acted as their own contractor.

The family did most of the work themselves and then loved the house for years after.

Michael Graves hasn't designed very many houses.

No, he moved to doing mostly commercial buildings, and he's probably best known for that around the United States and even overseas.

Sure.

And then plus the accessories that he does.

Yes.

Including furniture.

Including furniture.

You know, when we look at this space, one of the things that I like is that, again, like the funky house, modern furnishings fit perfectly well in this space.

And there's a Michael Graves chair and also a wonderful kidney bean sofa from the 1950s.

That's a wonderful piece, the Vladimir Kagan piece.

And then and then there's a Gustav Stickley piece that's from the same time period as the Franke House that we saw earlier.

And like the Franke House, there's a lot of attention to detail.

And one of the most interesting parts of this room is the mirror.

Graves designs do often have a lot of whimsy, and in the houses that I've seen of his, he almost always has a special mural that he's done for the homeowners.

And this one was done specifically for the Hanselmanns.

And he painted it himself.

He painted it himself.

He actually didn't sign it at the time he painted it, but when he was in Fort Wayne two years ago, he finally signed his work.

It is a personal mural, though, because this is the Hanselmann's quilt and that's the Hanselmann's cat.

And supposedly there's water from the yard and other things in in this picture as well.

It's just it's all very personal references to the family, the house, the lot, the location.

Right.

At the same time, it's very abstract and very contemporary.

And it goes with the rest of the design of the house.

This house is just the more we're in it, the more I'm amazed by it.

The little subtle touches that break the house out of being just a pure box and being somewhat predictable.

Behind us is a little tiny window that's no more than four or five inches wide that goes from floor to ceiling and gives you a view in this square space out into the woods and there's another space upstairs in the master bedroom, the of that there's another large window and you don't notice it while you're inside.

And the window itself is four inches outside of the box of the house.

It makes you feel like you're in the house.

But at the same time, outside the dimensions of the structure is right.

There's also a round window upstairs, a skylight, actually.

Did you see it when you were?

I didn't see that.

It's very nice because you rise up to the second floor and then there's this cloud of light that just hangs over you.

It's very nice.

Neat.

Every home has a story about the people who lived in the house.

And about the way it was built and how it looks.

We've spanned about 140 years in house design, and it's obvious that many things have changed.

Yes, Angie, and not only in the look, but in the materials used and the construction methods.

But many things have remained the same.

Houses are still built to look good, both on the outside and the inside, and to provide the best use of the space available and to be as comfortable as possible for their owners.

And of course, to last for a very long time.

You know, it's fascinating to look at these houses because they are artifacts of our community and we can look at them to see how we've changed over time and how we are still changing.

I hope you've enjoyed exploring these houses as much as we have.

Thanks for watching.

Homes with History.