Jason Bush feels a special kinship with a photo he carries in his cell phone – and no, the picture is not of his dog, child or mom.

It shows seven men and two dogs lounging and standing on the front lawn of what is now Bass Mansion at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne.

The photo is dated 1903; it’s likely the men are workers taking a break from their construction jobs, because the massive mansion behind them lacks part of its roof.

Lately, the same place has been swarming with 21st century construction workers, including Bush, as the university completes a $5.6 million restoration of an opulent building that still has the power to turn heads.

“It’s neat to be able to work on this and see how things were done 100 years ago,” says Bush, a supervisor for Project Design & Piping, Fort Wayne, adding he has “nothing but respect” for the home’s earlier craftsmen.

“It’s been a very challenging job, trying to maintain the aesthetics of the building and take things apart and put things back together so they work,” he adds.

William Slayton, the university’s director of major gifts and campaigns and unofficial mansion historian, says Fort Wayne industrialist John H. Bass built the home to dazzle.

Bass made his fortune in land speculation in Iowa and South Dakota and then as a canal operator and an owner of a local foundry that at one time might have been the largest producer of railroad-car carriages and wheels in the world, Slayton says.

“For his day, he was pretty wealthy by any standard,” he says. “He was not a Rockefeller or a Carnegie, but estimates put (his fortune) in 1922 dollars at $6 (million) or $7 million of net worth, and I suspect that’s understated.”

There’s nothing understated about the house Bass built.

Consider that the central “reception area” has a nearly 13-foot-high oak-coffered ceiling, a three-story carved circular staircase, a pink marble fireplace and parquet floors.

The dining room has a 30-foot-long, hand-painted mural of a hunting scene along one wall and opens by concave wooden doors onto what was a glass-roofed conservatory housed in a turret.

There’s an entire wing of guest bedrooms, each with ornately carved wood trim; a third-floor ballroom under a round dome, featuring a mural of dancing nymphs (in several stages of undress); and a billiard room where German beer steins once lined a wooden ledge above a green velvet divan. A Flemish-themed mural covers one wall.

There are also carved bird’s-eye maple doors and trim in Bass’ bedroom, a library fireplace of South American onyx and decorative wedding-cake plaster that oozes from nearly every ceiling.

Slayton says the mansion was originally built by Bass as a summer house in 1887 for an estimated $15,000. But the structure, a wooden frame encased in sandstone, burned to the ground in 1901 as a result of a boiler explosion.

The fire was dramatic. Bass, in his late 60s, rescued the night boiler tender out of the basement. Then, Bass and his son-in-law, Dr. Gaylord Leslie, carried out possessions from the house until the sandstone started collapsing around them, according to newspaper accounts.

The house was a total loss. But the day after the catastrophe, Bass vowed that he “was going to rebuild the house better than it was before,” Slayton says. The cost was put at $82,000, with perhaps an equal sum spent on the interior decoration, he says.

The photo Bush carries was taken during the home’s reconstruction, Slayton notes.

Bass died in 1922, and the foundry suffered during the Great Depression, eventually leading to Bass’ daughter, Laura Leslie, selling the property. The buyers were the Sisters of St. Francis of Perpetual Adoration, who moved their 62-student Saint Francis College, an all-girls school, from Lafayette to the site in 1944.

The mansion originally served as classrooms, cafeteria, convent and student dormitory, but it was later dedicated to classrooms and the library and then exclusively to library use.

Surprisingly, the generations of student occupation was not unduly unkind to the building, says Ken Williams, director of operations.

But Bass’s original spare-no-expense attitude and the large number of rooms and features have posed challenges for the Saint Francis restorers, he says, and not just from the charred remains that workers found when they were replacing the roof of the conservatory.

Finding tradespeople who could repair tile roofs, duplicate plaster designs, re-colorize hand-painted trim such as the delicate floral borders of the Louis XVI bedroom with its ornately carved window frames, match hand-painted fabric wall coverings and replicate decorative ceramic tile for the home’s numerous bathrooms and fireplaces wasn’t always easy, Williams says.

“This whole building is plaster, and that’s a dying art,” Williams says. “We had trouble finding plasterers because there are not many of them, because everyone has drywall.” Rosema Construction of Fort Wayne was chosen for the job.

To do the painting, the university found a firm in Milwaukee, Conrad Schmitt Studios, that also restored part of the University of Notre Dame’s basilica murals.

Scalamandre Co. from Hauppauge, N.Y., was able to re-create fabric wallpaper, Williams says.

Local contractors were used for exterior restoration, plumbing and electrical work – including adding Internet access, which is being run under the woodwork – and for a building alteration that inconspicuously added an elevator.

Slayton says the new use for the mansion, which has been on the National Register of Historic Places since 1982, will be as a campus administration building.

The mansion will house the office of Sister M. Elise Kriss, the university’s president, in what had been Mrs. Bass’ bedroom suite. Alumni and academic affairs offices will also be housed in the mansion.

The rooms downstairs, in what had been the home’s public areas, will be furnished as they were in Bass’ time, with as many original pieces as possible, Slayton says.

The area will include a museum on the history of the family and the mansion, he says, adding that the university already has some furnishings in its collection and is seeking others that might still exist after being sold at auction.

The university plans to host social and business meetings in the mansion and to make the ballroom available for rent to the public for receptions and dinners, university spokeswoman Jan Miller says.

The majority of the work is scheduled to be finished by mid-year, she says. Officials are still seeking donations for the restoration and ongoing maintenance of the mansion, which will be rechristened Brookside, its original name.

Gifts of $25,000 or $50,000 over five years will allow donors limited use of the facility for private or corporate events, she notes.

But until the job is done, the mansion is making an unusual and rewarding work site for Dustin Degryse of Edon, Ohio, a carpenter for Schenkel Bros. of Fort Wayne.

As he bends over to strip white paint from one of the curved benches that lined the curved walls of the ballroom, he says working there is “awesome.”

“It gives you such respect for the craftsmanship of how they did it with the methodology back then. No power tools,” he says. “And so much of the work is really intricate. You get an appreciation.”

rsalter@jg.net