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When Scott and Catherine Hill moved to Fort Wayne from Evansville nine years ago, they were looking for an old house in a neighborhood not far from downtown.
When they saw the big yellow house at East State and St. Joseph boulevards, they knew they’d found just what they wanted.
“It’s just a unique house – there’s no house like this house. … It was so unique it stood out from everything else,” says Scott Hill, 39, an English teacher at Fort Wayne’s Homestead High School.
“It’s actually crazy in a lot of ways. It’s not a logical house. It’s big, has lots of rooms and is kind of rambling.
“… We hadn’t had our children yet, but I know there was a big thought in the back of our minds – what a fun place this house would be to grow up in.”
The Hills’ house does have its fun elements – a stone fireplace in the center of one of the two downstairs living rooms instead of along an outside wall, myriad French doors that offer tantalizing glimpses of rooms beyond, a dining room and sunporch at the front of the house, a maid’s quarters at the back and a huge country-style kitchen with a sunny wall of east-facing windows and plenty of built-in cabinetry.
But the house also has a historic pedigree that makes it a standout offering on this year’s Northside Neighborhood Association’s Historical Home and Garden Walk on Friday and Saturday.
Where to begin the history lesson? An obvious place would be the bronze National Register of Historic Places marker along the St. Joseph Boulevard curb. The plaque identifies the house as the home of Philo T. Farnsworth from 1948 to 1967. Farnsworth held patents on inventions that facilitated the development of television.
But that’s just the start, says Angie Quinn, executive director of ARCH, Fort Wayne’s non-profit historic preservation group.
She points out that the house, built about 1905, was designed by Joel Roberts Ninde, who, despite the masculine-sounding first name, was a woman. Indeed, she was one of Indiana’s first female house designers.
Ninde, a Mississippi native who pronounced her first name in two syllables with the accent on the second, Quinn says, became one of Fort Wayne’s favorite architects of her time despite having no formal training. As part of Wildwood Builders Co. started by her husband, Ninde and her business partner, Grace Crosby, designed and built more than 300 homes in Fort Wayne between 1901 and 1916, when Ninde succumbed to a stroke at the age of 42.
Many of the homes are in today’s South Wayne and Shawnee Place neighborhoods, but they are also scattered throughout the city’s older residential areas.
Ninde’s design approach was a just-developing aesthetic that valued simplicity, economy, light and functionality in houses, along with a certain artistic flair.
“What she wanted was homes that were modern and convenient,” Quinn says. “At that time, the alternative was late Victorian, which were either Gothic and dark or with all this gee-gaw stuff like gingerbread, bric-a-brac, which she didn’t like,” Quinn says.
Ninde disliked such houses so much that she refused to live in an imposing Fort Wayne Italiante Victorian built by her father-in-law, who was a judge, Quinn says. Instead, the story goes, Ninde lived in a downtown hotel while designing and building a home more to her liking – a large Dutch Colonial, on a corner of her father-in-law’s estate known as Wildwood, which was along Fairfield Avenue.
Ninde designed the Hills’ house, a cross between the emerging Craftsman or Arts-and-Crafts style and an oversized cottage, for her brother-in-law, Daniel Ninde. He figures large in Fort Wayne history as one of the founders of Lincoln National Life Insurance Co. At the time, State Boulevard was still a dirt road, Quinn says.
Daniel Ninde sold the house to Lincoln’s first actuary, Franklin Mead, and his wife, Georgiana, who named it Iris Crest. Franklin Mead was an avid iris grower who eventually donated his collection to the city parks department and is now memorialized at the entrance to Foster Park, Quinn says.
Mead sold the property to Farnsworth, who used the basement as a laboratory, according to Hill, relying on research by the previous owners who had the property placed on the National Register.
The Hills’ improvements to the house have consisted mainly of lightening up dark wall and woodwork to show off the large interior spaces. The couple also remodeled areas at the back of the house as a laundry room and updated a bathroom that was part of the maid’s quarters.
Scott Hill also has enjoyed improving the cottage-style garden, which is chock full of perennials, with native species. A few irises still grow by the garage.
The couple are now repainting their master bedroom, and Scott Hill would like to build a window seat in the bedroom used by his 6-year-old daughter, June Apple.
The couple also have a son, Birk, 4.
Catherine Hill is executive director of the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer and has had the help of some of the company’s designers in picking décor colors, her husband says.
But, he says, the couple have not gotten into heavy decorating, preferring instead a child-friendly and comfy style.
“The Farnsworth connection didn’t make the decision for us (to buy the house),” Scott Hill says. But he does acknowledge a fondness for being the caretaker of a piece of history, as well as a fascination with parts of Farnsworth’s life.
Hill calls “tragic” the story about how patents Farnsworth secured were profited upon by others, and he says it’s interesting “how little he approved of the use of his invention, how he was against television as we know it.”
Farnsworth, curmudgeonly in later life, “thought image transmission should be for other more important uses, like national security,” Hill says.
Pointing to a wide living room wall – dominated by a modern abstract realist painting bought from a local artists’ collective and anchored by bookshelves filled with literary classics – Hill says he shares a little bit of Farnsworth’s sentiments on that score.
He and his family watch little TV, he says.
“Yeah, in a lot of houses, that would be a big, flat-screen TV, right there, for sure,” he says. “Not us.”
