Posted December 11, 200915 yr Warren, Indiana November 30, 2009 On the way to see the wind turbines. Warren straddles the Huntington County/Wells County line. It was founded in 1837 by Samuel Jones, a veteran of the War of 1812. Jones first named it Jonesboro, but changed the name soon afterward because Jonesboro already had been claimed by another Indiana town. Cute little courtyard The 1884 Pulse Opera House went from traveling shows through various uses and fell into disuse by 1970. It was used for storage until 1986, when restoration was begun. Now it hosts not-for-profit summer theatre, and prior to the Christmas Holidays presented "It's A Wonderful Life." Prowling alleys Cute! Leaf pickup detail Oh, My! Salamonie River, a major Wabash tributary Fleming Mitchell built a water-powered mill here between 1837 and 1840. The mill passed through several owners over the years, and in 1921 was rebuilt as a five-storey structure with machinery powered by four horizontal turbines. The 1921 building burned in 1976, and a new feed mill was built on the foundation of the old one. The remains of a low-head dam, the water intakes, and the tailwater channel still are visible. Prowling alleys again Oh, My! again. There was a "sold" sign in the yard and a U-Haul was parked at the curb, with furniture and a moving dolly on the porch. I don't know if someone was moving in or out.
December 11, 200915 yr Impressive! "You don't just walk into a bar and mix it up by calling a girl fat" - buildingcincinnati speaking about new forumers
December 11, 200915 yr Nice small town photos! The aforementioned Queen Anne style home with the tower and "moongate" window on the second floor looks like a possible design by Knoxville, TN 19th century mail order architect, George Franklin Barber. Barber's customized mail order plans were shipped all over the U.S. and even as far away as China and Japan. He was active from 1888 until his death in 1915. His specialty and best known designs were for his 1890's Queen Anne style houses. Examples can still be found in nearly every state in the Union. The moongate window would have had colorful stained glass originally. I liked the other historic Warren buildings as well. The ancient hand cranked pump surviving on the streetcorner is unique, in my experience. Lots of history and great old architecture in this town. I surely hope the towered brick Queen Anne gets preserved for future generations. It's hard to imagine such pretentious architecture was once considered common and "normal". I have a friend in Lakewood, OH who is a George F. Barber scholar/enthusiast. I'll give him a head's up and find out if he thinks it's a Barber design or not. Thanks for sharing, I'll have to put Warren (Indiana) on my future list of places to visit.
December 12, 200915 yr Very impressive small town. Indiana seems to have more than its share of great little towns loaded with Vicorians. The Queen Anne has so much going on, you barely know where to look first. A real showplace!
December 12, 200915 yr Nice small town photos! The aforementioned Queen Anne style home with the tower and "moongate" window on the second floor looks like a possible design by Knoxville, TN 19th century mail order architect, George Franklin Barber ... That's interesting info about Barber. I don't know anything about the history of the home, but I wonder if its location across the road from the mill indicates that it might have been the home of a former mill owner. It was most recently a used-car dealership, and there's a large, later addition on the back that accomodated that business. I don't know if the home is even occupied now; it would be wonderful to see someone with deep pockets buy it and restore it to its former splendor. The "moongate" window really needs stained glass to keep it from looking like a huge hole in the house. There's more to Warren, including more commercial enterprises, a large and highly-regarded United Methodist retirement home, and a history center. I ran out of time, and will cover those later. Warren was where I joined up with my brother for our drive to see the wind turbines. I had overestimated the time it would take me to get there, and killed the waiting time taking photos downtown.
December 12, 200915 yr That looks like a cool town. Thanks for the pictures. I noticed a lot of the buildings have beautiful cornices.
December 12, 200915 yr That's the epitome of small town charm. I love small towns like that. Self-sufficient and utilitarian. Thats for the tour, Rob.
December 12, 200915 yr Nice small town photos! The aforementioned Queen Anne style home with the tower and "moongate" window on the second floor looks like a possible design by Knoxville, TN 19th century mail order architect, George Franklin Barber. Barber's customized mail order plans were shipped all over the U.S. and even as far away as China and Japan. He was active from 1888 until his death in 1915. His specialty and best known designs were for his 1890's Queen Anne style houses. Examples can still be found in nearly every state in the Union. The moongate window would have had colorful stained glass originally. I liked the other historic Warren buildings as well. The ancient hand cranked pump surviving on the streetcorner is unique, in my experience. Lots of history and great old architecture in this town. I surely hope the towered brick Queen Anne gets preserved for future generations. It's hard to imagine such pretentious architecture was once considered common and "normal". I have a friend in Lakewood, OH who is a George F. Barber scholar/enthusiast. I'll give him a head's up and find out if he thinks it's a Barber design or not. Thanks for sharing, I'll have to put Warren (Indiana) on my future list of places to visit. that's very interesting. I had just heard of the mail order homes from Sears in the early 1900's. Thanks for the info... http://www.mainstreetpainesville.org/
December 12, 200915 yr I sent links to this topic page to two different George F. Barber enthusiasts and have yet to hear a confirmation. I do know numerous details on the Warren Queen Anne style house can also be found on houses in Barber's 1891 planbook Cottage Souvenir Number 2. I could not find a "free"" version of this book online but on Google books did find a free version of Barber's Modern Dwellings from 1901: http://books.google.com/books?id=JTkAAAAAYAAJ&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=&f=false (hope this link works) There are some towered Queen Anne style designs towards the end of the book as the style was beginning to fade away in the early 1900's. I know of some people who purposely look for pattern book designs in the smaller towns they visit. Given that many smaller communities lacked resident architects, plan books and mail order plans supplimented local builders. By the early 1900's Sears, Roebuck, & Co. and a dozen or so other kit home suppliers appeared on the market. Whole neighborhoods in some communities were created from Sears kit houses. Architectural historians have a lot of fun tracking them down. It takes a good eye (and memory) to track down some plan book or kit houses.
December 12, 200915 yr Interesting to see the designs; I've seen similar treatments of windows, etc. in my neighborhood, sometimes on surviving houses that have been altered beyond recognition compared to what they originally were. If you ever find yourself in the Warren vicinity, you'd do well to visit the county seat, Huntington. It's an old canal town that has a lot of history and some surviving vintage homes. The CBD is impressive, notwithstanding a lot of vacancies and buildings in need of TLC. I did a photo set on it a little over a year ago. Very nice! Wait a minute, what's this...UrbanIndiana.com? Damn Hoosiers!;) I snagged the domain name some time ago in case someone should come along who'd like to create something similar to Urbanohio.com. I have neither the time nor the technical expertise to do it myself. Meanwhile, it's my personal playground. My main site is RobertPence.com, and it links to UrbanIndiana.com.
December 13, 200915 yr Robert, Thank you very much for the link to the picturesque Huntington, IN photos. The county courthouse is incredible and the town's architecture overall indicates a phenomenal amount of local prosperity during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The surviving mansions attest to that. Huntington, being an early canal town, is older too with some rare surviving Federal style buildings from before 1850. Sadly, like so many smaller Midwestern towns with a changing economic base, recent decades have been far less kind. The whole "downtown Mall" concept seems to have been adopted almost wholesale by small-town America during the 1970's as a way to revitalize the commercial core. Whatever limited success such artificial "mall" projects had was soon negated by the appearance of big-box mega-stores usually out on the fringes of town. These retailers, with an unfair size advantage in mass merchandizing, in turn soon emptied many downtown commercial districts turning them into ghost towns. Such is the course of "progress", I suppose. Even so, there appears quite a bit to see in Huntington even with some of the historic buildings in these photos now being cited as demolished. It's been a decade or longer since I "toured" some of Indiana's small towns on the way to Sturgis, MI where some family friends live. Looks like I need to think about another visit as neither of these two interesting towns were on my last itinerary.
December 14, 200915 yr Since maybe someone might be interested, I did hear back from a George F. Barber enthusiast about the Warren, IN Queen Anne style house: (with the "moongate" window upstairs) "Yes, it is very much a Barber design -- you'll find the exact design in Cottage Souvenir No. 2, as [i think] Design No. 33 (I always tend to get the design number wrong on first guess). You don't often see this design in brick (and it may be just brick veneer -- Barber makes a reference to this option in regards to a lot of his firm's designs, including this one). I was previously not aware of this example. Thanks!!" Maybe this attribution to a nationally known architect will somehow help in saving this once-grand home. Thanks again, Robert, for sharing.
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