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Anne__archie, Crawfordsville, IN (2026)

05/25/2026

Welcome to the fourth and final installment of this year’s Preservation Month series with . I have one more Art Deco-style building for you.

Now, 125 E. Main is pretty unassuming. I know I’ve passed by it for decades without ever really noticing it. Art Deco details are like that sometimes, especially in a downtown mostly constructed in the 1880s.

At least as early as 1887, 125 E. Main was a drug store (Photo 3). In 1900, Jacob Dick had purchased an interest in the drug store. In 1910, Dr. Charles Riley (Photo 4, look at that handsome dude) had formed a partnership with Dick. The Dick & Riley Drug Store operated until 1933, when it burned down in the large fire on that block (Photo 5). At that point, Dick retired. Riley’s obituary states that he had worked there until 1931, when he left to practice medicine in New Ross (he died of a heart attack while working there in 1937) (Photo 6). Dick passed away in 1944 (Photo 7). Interestingly enough, they both lived on West Main Street three blocks apart, and even more interesting to me, Dr. Riley rented rooms in the house I myself lived in at 311 W. Main.

Obviously, the block was not built back in a day, and in 1934 the lot was still vacant. In 1936, it was listed as the “Gt. A & P Co.,” which stood for the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company. What would become the ubiquitous A&P Grocery occupied the newly built one-story Art Deco-style store. The building was significantly smaller than the previous one. It was (is) covered with buff glazed brick, had a brick geometric design, and vertical decorations at the corners of the roofline. By 1942, the A&P became a Merit Shoe store, and then even later, Kenney Shoes (Photo 8). By the 1980s (and likely well before), the original facade was covered mostly by porcelain enamel panels, which are still there today.

Let me know any memories you have of this building! Thank you for coming along with us this year!

05/18/2026

Welcome back to the third installment of the 2026 Crawfordsville Main Street Preservation Month Series! We’re continuing our tour of Art Deco/Moderne buildings.

Today we’ll be talking about the Nye-Booe Drug Company that was located at 111 N. Washington St. The three-story brick building dated to 1856. In 1864, Willis May purchased it and opened up a drug store. Willis’ two daughters both married druggists in 1881 - Hattie married Marshall Nye in April and Eva married John Booe in October. The couples resided right next to each other at 215 and 219 E. College St (Photo 9).

Both men had been working with other druggists in town prior to going into business together. By 1888 Booe sold out his shares of Moffett & Booe. In 1890, 111 N. Washington was listed in the city directory as Nye & Co. By 1891, the store was listed as Nye & Booe. Check out the 1913 Sanborn that shows it being three stories tall (Photo 8). In 1937, the building had its third floor removed and the facade was redone in the popular style of the day - Art Deco (Photo 5).

The store stayed in the family until it closed in 1973. Can you imagine how much a drugstore would have changed in that time? “Medicines” that druggists used in the late 1800s/early 1900s were more of a home remedy than an exact science and often contained ingredients that probably shouldn’t have been given to anyone. Photos 6-7 show a small advertising booklet that touted “S.S.S.” tonic that could cure most anything. Newspapers of the time have a multitude of personal testimonials about miracle products. Today the building belongs to Clore Insurance Group.

Thank you to Brad and Becky Hurt for some of this information, and of course my dad for his research assistance. Stay tuned for our last post next week!

05/11/2026

Welcome back to the second installment of the 2026 Crawfordsville Main Street Preservation Month Series!

While this building doesn’t scream Art Moderne, I do think it’s a pretty late version of it. Art Moderne is very similar to Art Deco, but includes curved walls, with windows that curve with them, along with the stucco color. Think more horizontal lines in comparison to Art Deco’s vertical ones. The Goodyear building at the corner of Market and Water Streets was built in 1947 as a Dodge dealership under the ownership of O.K. Galloway. He is the real story here, not the actual building.

Oliver K. Galloway was born in 1893 in Fountain County. As he told it, his older brother was a sickly baby, but when he himself was born, he dad proclaimed that he was “OK!” His mother found a name to fit that assessment. In 1909 a neighbor who owned a Haynes car asked O.K. if he’d like to accompany him on a trip to Kokomo for some parts. Of course he did, and they traveled to the Haynes factory, which he said was churning out 2-5 cars/day. After that he was hooked. In what was truly a bootstrap story, O.K. and his brother started a garage in Stone Bluff, which then turned into a dealership in Waveland (there were two plus one garage then, can you imagine?), and then Crawfordsville. In Waveland, he was selling (among others) the Willys-Knight car for $1,600, which at that time was top of the line. His first location in town was on East Pike Street, then South Green, and finally the location we’re talking about today. O.K. really did see the spectrum from the birth of automobiles to late 20th century versions. Today the building houses Pomp’s Tire Service, continuing the auto legacy of the location.

How do I know all of this (and the great details that won’t fit here)? Because I found an interview recorded with O.K. before he died, which is every historian’s dream. I could do an entire series just on him! Anyway, enjoy these photos and let me know if you knew O.K. and/or bought a car there!

05/04/2026

Welcome to the 2026 Preservation Month Series! We will be showcasing four downtown buildings this year, one every Monday of the month to celebrate.

The southwest corner of E. Main and Green Streets has a storied history of department stores. The existing building was built after a major fire that took out most of the block of buildings in 1933. Bischof’s Big Store occupied 127-129 E. Main St. starting in the late 1880s with Jones Drug Store on the corner (check out the 1913 Sanborn). The building was a whopping four stories tall, and featured a vast array of dry goods, clothing, shoes, etc. By the 1920s, Bischof’s Big Store became Goodman’s Department Store, which maintained steady business. Tragedy struck on January 10, 1933 when a fire that began in the basement of Goodman’s took out a quarter of a city block. By the end of that year, Goodman’s had rebuilt, now taking up the corner lot at 131-133 E. Main St. The new building had a basement (prominently accessible when you first walked in), and two floors of department store goods with a mezzanine level between the first and second floors (now covered over with diagonal siding).

By the 1950s, Goodman’s had become Dellekamp’s, continuing on with the department store business. My own dad worked there in the early 1970s, not long before it closed in 1972. Peep a portion of his paycheck stub from 1970 when he was making $1.50/hr 😳. After Dellekamp’s closed, the building sat empty for a bit and had a variety of stores/businesses for the next few decades. Dance by Deborah opened in the early 2000s and has occupied the building ever since.

The Art Deco style was popular in the 1920s and early 1930s. The Dellekamp Building has a very restrained version of this, as evidenced by a beige brick that mimics a stucco wall, horizontal lines of windows, and those small decorative horizontal accents with a single vertical line in the middle. I think it’s fun to imagine the almost 100 years of high-end, customer service-focused, huge department stores in downtown Crawfordsville! Did you shop at Dellekamp’s?

12/25/2025

Merry Christmas 2025!

05/26/2025

Our final Preservation Month post with Crawfordsville Main Street is a unique play on the 2025 theme of “Faces in Architecture” (a stroke of genius on my part, pun intended). Today we are talking about the clock on the Winchell’s Jeweler building.

The story is a very interesting one: As many know, the Montgomery County courthouse was built in 1876, and included an impressive clock tower. The clock itself cost $840, and was considered a masterpiece, uniquely designed and manufactured by E. Howard and Co. of Boston. Combined with the 1,061-lb bell, the clock marked the hours and was reported to be heard for miles.

As many also know, the courthouse clock tower was removed in 1941. The clock mechanism was stored unceremoniously in many places, becoming unusable over the years. In 1967, it was auctioned off with other county items. It ended up in the hands of Leonard Winchell and Hubert Danzebrink, partners in Winchell’s jewelry business.

What happened next was nothing short of incredible. Hubert, despite having no experience of working on something like this, spent countless hours refinishing and recreating 200 pieces of the clock, restoring it to working condition. A balcony was installed in their new shop at 109 N. Washington, facing the original location of the clock. A new clock face was installed in the brand new facade, with the original clock ticking away inside.

Today, the building is owned by Tim Jones of Phantom Point Technology Services. When he purchased the building from Hubert, he made a promise to take care of the clock, a promise he intends to keep. The clock remains in working condition to this day.

Big thanks to Dellie Craig at CDPL and Tim Jones for this one.

05/19/2025

Welcome back to the 2025 Preservation Month series with ! We are still looking at faces in architecture.

The Montgomery County’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument was designed by Rudolph Schwartz and was constructed in 1906. Schwartz was an immigrant from Vienna, Austria and is best known for his work on the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in downtown Indianapolis. There are at least 30 monuments attributed to Schwartz throughout the state.

The 32-foot obelisk is constructed out of Bedford limestone and adorned with several bronze plaques, an infantryman with a fixed bayonet, a cavalryman with a rifle, and topped by a female figure holding a torch in her left hand (symbolizing liberty) and an olive branch in her right hand (symbolizing peace). Two women’s faces are carved in relief on opposite sides of the monument. There were originally fountains at the base (Photo 14), but were removed at one point. The total cost to construct the monument was $6,000 (which would be about $218,000 today). Photo 10 shows the courthouse around 1900 without the monument. Photo 11 shows the monument around 1940 while the courthouse tower was being dismantled. In 2010 Allen Monument worked to clean the monument. It got another facelift just this year when the bronze was refurbished and a clear coat added to help preserve it.

Bronze plaques honor veterans of the War for Independence (1776), the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804), the French and Indian War (1811-1812), the War with Great Britain (1812-1814), the Black Hawk War (1832), the Mexican War (1846-1848), War for the Union (1861-1865), the Spanish American War (1898), World War I (1914-1918), World War II (1939-1945), the Korean Conflict (1950-1953), the Vietnam War (1961-1975), and the Afghanistan Conflict (2001-2014).

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05/12/2025

It’s week two for my partnership with Crawfordsville Main Street for Preservation Month 2025! We’re taking a nod from last week for another building with Judah Ben-Hur’s face on it.

The Ben Hur Life Building was constructed in the Neoclassical style in 1911. The Supreme Tribe of Ben Hur, which was a fraternal organization as well as a life insurance company, occupied the first floor and multiple businesses occupied the upper floors (dentists, doctors, hair salons, etc.). According to the National Register nomination, the business was the most important local business in the first two decades of the 1900s.

The first floor was remodeled in 1940 with the addition of marble, both inside and out. You can see in some of the old photos how the entrances used to look before the remodel. You can see in Photo #3 the engraving of Judah Ben-Hur (which is very difficult to photograph, but you can barely see his face) on the altered exterior.

Prior to the Ben Hur building, the lot was occupied by the Kelly Grocery in the Thomas Block building. Photo #5 was taken around 1900. The first offices for the Ben Hur Life Association were on the second floor of this building.

In the mid to late 1990s, the company changed its name to USA Life One Insurance Company of Indiana, but did not occupy the building much longer after that. The building sat vacant for decades.

In a huge preservation success story, the building has been completely renovated into a multi-use property by AP Development LLC. Check out the last photo for details on the nearing opening of the building!

Historic photos courtesy of the (as always).

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05/05/2025

It’s time for the 2025 Preservation Month series with Crawfordsville Main Street! This year’s theme from the Indiana Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology is “The Faces of Architecture.” I’m pretty sure they’re focusing on gargoyles and such, but here we’ll be looking at some actual faces!

First up this year is the General Lew Wallace Study. The study was designed by Lew Wallace himself and built 1895-98. Wallace was a native of Indiana, a lawyer, Civil War general, inventor, artist, and politician. Architecturally, the study building is a mixture of Greek, Romanesque, and Byzantine styles, influenced by his travels as an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1881-1885. It is constructed out of Carnegie steel, Bedford limestone, and vitrified brick from Akron, Ohio.

Each side of the study has a face carved into the frieze (horizontal band of decorative design often found on buildings).The face carved into the front (south side) is that of Judah Ben-Hur. Judah was the main character in Wallace’s book Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ, the best-selling novel of the 19th century (written in 1880). The east side features Tirzah Ben-Hur, Judah’s sister. The north and west sides show the Prince of India and Princess Irene from his third book The Prince of India (written in 1893). The faces are posted in the order described. The last historic photo is courtesy of General Lew Wallace Study and Museum.

As a bonus, I’m also including a photo of the statue of Lew Wallace by Andrew O’Connor, who finished both marble (in Washington D.C.) and bronze (Crawfordsville) versions in 1910. I recently was able to see the marble version, which was a very exciting treat in D.C.

Stay tuned for more faces to come every Monday of May!

03/28/2025

“The DC Metro is one of Brutalist design and reflects the influence of Washington D.C.’s neoclassical architecture within the city. Designed by architect Harry Weese, the system first opened in 1976. The Brutalist design features heavy use of exposed concrete, granite and repetitive design motifs with indirect lighting. The DC Metro is one of the most uniquely designed systems worldwide and is one the busiest underground transit systems in the US.” (https://www.petersteinhauer.com/metro).

Photo 1: Union Station stop on the red line
Photo 2: three floors of stops (one above and one below in this photo)
Photo 3: Metro as seen from Reagan airport

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