Linton House

Description:	The Linton House drawn by Juliet A. Peddle, local architect and artist. THE LINTON HOUSE, DRAWING BY JULIET A. PEDDLE, TERRE HAUTE ARTIST AND ARCHITECT.The Linton House stands at 621 Ohio Street and is occupied by the Maumee Collieries Company. This house, built in 1830 by David Linton, was one of the earliest brick houses built here and was considered almost palatial at the time. It was originally located in the middle of the block bounded by Ohio, Walnut, Fifth and Sixth streets and was out of the town limits which then extended only to Fifth street. When it was built they say there were no houses between Fifth and Ohio and Second and Wabash, where Mr. Lintons store was located, and it was possible to call from the house to the store and make oneself heard!In 1832 Mr. and Mrs. Richard Blake lived here for a while, and they brought into the house one of the curiosities of the neighborhood-a piano-the first one in Terre Haute, and they claimed it was the first one to be brought across the Alleghenies.At some time not long before 1879, Fred Ross purchased the house and in 1879 moved it forward to its present location. The moving of a brick house was considered quite a feat, and they engaged a Chicago firm, Baumbard & Sheeler, to do the work. There was a crowd around the house the whole time it was being moved watching the work, and the newspaper even gave it a write-up.The purpose of moving the residence was to convert it to business uses as the neighborhood was obviously being taken over by business and was no longer suitable for residential purposes. It has been used for business ever since then.Mr. Ross sold the property to Miss Susan Hemingway, the niece of Chauncey Rose, and it now belongs to the Rose Polytechnic Institute.I am told that only minor changes have been made within the house and that it is essentially unchanged with the quaint stair hall in the center and two rooms on each side both up and downstairs. From the appearance of them, I would judge that many of the original doors are still in the house though some have had an upper wooden panel replaced by glass to make it more suitable for office use. There are two mantels which might easily be the originals, though I have not been able to verify this.The fact that the house was built of a more or less permanent material like brick and could be converted to business uses has prevented its being wrecked to make way for the inroads of the down town area as so many of our older houses were, and if it continues to have the good care it now receives, there is no reason why it should not stand here for years to come.
Origin:	01/01/2005
Contributor(s):	Peddle, Juliet, 1899-1979
Source:	http://indianamemory.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/rose/id/808
Collection:	Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology Logan Library
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/UND/1.0/
Copyright:	Copyright Undetermined
Subjects:	Architectural drawings Architecture Houses Office buildings Linton, David, d.1835 Architecture Domestic Life Business & Industry

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