Each year, the Brown County Democrat celebrates some aspect of Brown County history in our Founders Day section. This year we’re writing about residents who are about 80 or older, who have incredible stories to share and who define “Brown County character” in some way or another. If you have a suggestion for a person to feature in the next Founders Day issue, send it to [email protected] or call us at 812-988-2221.
If you ask Lee Waltman what he’s built in Brown County, be prepared to listen for awhile.
A tour of Nashville reads like his resume. Pick an end of town to start from and he can walk you through his career over the past 40 to 45 years like it all happened yesterday.
Starting on 46 East: “I did some work on what used to be the Abbey Inn. … The Alberts, when they owned it, part of it we made into overnight stays.
“Then across the highway I did some remodeling in the Red Bud Inn. It used to be a Baptist church.”
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]The Green Valley Motor Lodge nearby used to be a gas station. Waltman Construction built both businesses for the same owner, Ed Lucas.
Didn’t he also build Nashville Town Hall?
Yes, he did. And the Brown County Democrat office, too.
“I did the renovation on the county courthouse several years ago … upstairs and downstairs, and we built an addition on the end where the judge’s quarters are. … And the county jail that used to be next door, well, I built the jail cells and everything that was in the old sheriff’s office.
“And, let’s see, across the street, I did the Big Woods Pizza building, the (George C.) Tucker building. (Before it was built) there was a gas station and I think they sold some cars or something there at one time.”
He laughs a little to himself. “We tore that building all down except one little portion of it … because we were close to the property line … and it was the bathroom portion of the building that was left. … The toilet was sitting out there, and one wall, and the ladies who were shopping would come in and sit down on that toilet and have their picture taken.”
North of town, he built Bond-Mitchell Funeral Home.
“And if you’re coming back downtown, where the PNC bank is, where the tellers work in there, that used to be the drive-through lane. … It was so congested, people couldn’t get out of there to either go east or west because of the traffic flowing up through there, and the stoplight … so I took that all out of there and built an addition on the bank and had to put an addition on the vault and remodel the upstairs, downstairs, and put all those oak beams and all that stuff in there that you see.”
Another story comes to him. “I had a key to the bank. … I forgot to turn off the alarm one morning and the sheriff (Harry Snider) came around and said, ‘Oh, it’s just you, Waltman.’ I knew him well. He said, ‘Don’t forget to turn the damn alarm off next time.’”
The two-story yellow building on West Main was his work, too, the second floor of it. He also built the shop spaces on the west end of that street next to the Village Green.
“And then if you’re coming out of town … just before you get to Jackson Branch, there’s four two-story buildings there on the left. … Those were built as duplexes but they’re sold as condos. I built those four buildings there.”
It soon becomes clear that a better question might have been, “What haven’t you built in Brown County?”
“And down the street from the Methodist church, the Allison House bed and breakfast, that was just an old, run-down house. … Everything was all cracked and bent, and we were tearing things out and gutting it and we’d find old newspaper clippings that were inside the wall. And when we were doing the restoration and remodeling on the courthouse, we found a lot of old records of things upstairs there too.
“And gosh, let’s see. … You know where Calvin Place is, the Daily Grind? I built all four of those little buildings in there.
“And across the street where the Artist Colony (Inn) is, I built the one across the street on the north side … where the ice cream place and Lawrence Family Glassblowers are. … And if you look at that from out on the street, the roof has a big sag in it.”
Why?
“I had to build it like that. The architect drew it like that on purpose. … He was from the Netherlands or somewhere, and he said, ‘Now, I want this to have a big sag in the roof like it’s an old building. … I remember when we did that, everybody was laughing about ‘How come the roof’s got a sag in it?’ I said, ‘Well, it’s just weak construction.’
“And then on South Van Buren, right by (Out of) the Ordinary, there’s a two-story brick building there that kind of looks like a barn roof. I built that.
“And then I extended and built a new front on the Nashville Christian Church.
“And then across the street from the (church) parking lot is the T-Shirt Shop. My wife and I own that building, but it was just a horrible looking old building, so we had to remodel it.
“And then across the street where the convention bureau (Visitors Center) is, that used to be just an old garage in there. … We built an addition on it, put the stairs in and an elevator and all that for Dick Johnson who owned Johnson Oil Company. … It used to be a drugstore in the east end of that, Cox’s Drugstore. And then some time years later he decided to make a two-story out of it. … So we had to come around the outside, build a new wall around it and build a big I-beam across.”
He’s tracing a mental path out of downtown now, but the list of projects keeps growing. Moving onto Hawthorne Drive: “Out where the PNC drive-in bank is, I built that.
“And I did some of the work on the IGA when it was built, the porch and the area across the front and a bunch of interior framing where the deli is.
“And then I built the BMV building.
“And where the Family Dollar is now, the center part of that building was existing. It used to be a Hooks drugstore. Well, I built the addition down both sides of that where there used to be the Pine Room. … And, gosh … I think that’s about all I did there.
But wait, there’s more.
“Then I built the Shell station on the corner of 46 and Salt Creek Road. That was for Johnson Oil. And I did convenience stores for him for about 30 years all over Indiana. … And I did a lot of buildings in Columbus and Bloomington.”
What’s it like for him to drive around and see so many pieces of history that he created?
“I know, I do that once in awhile,” he admitted. “And sometimes I forget, ‘Oh, I built that house.’”
History
Two of the houses he built were his own. It took him and his crew about three years to get the last one done, they were so busy elsewhere.
It’s in this home where Waltman, 81, now sits at a bay window that looks out over grazing horses.
This land felt like home to Waltman, who grew up on his grandparents’ farm on Salt Creek Road. He and his wife, Lois, had built a house in Orchard Hill, but “I couldn’t stand it, being stuck on a little lot somewhere. I needed some space.”
Even though the couple had four children then, they bought the two-bedroom home that still stands on this farmstead and made do until a bigger home could be finished. He worked out of a chicken coop that he’d converted to an office.
But Waltman was used to roughing it.
“I was born in 1937, and we didn’t have electricity for so many years after that. We had kerosene lamps hanging ‘round on the walls and two wood stoves for heat; no bathroom, no inside water. We had an outhouse and a well out in the yard with a rope and bucket.”
Sometimes, the house was so cold that the water in the kitchen drinking bucket would freeze.
He and his brother would start the morning milking cows with their father, then head to school. In his grade school years he attended Taggart School near the Gatesville store, then Helmsburg High School.
He went to work for the telephone company in 1956. His job was to convert communities all over the state from “magneto” crank telephones to party-line dial phones, where as many as eight people shared the same phone line.
Lois was a telephone operator. That’s how they got acquainted.
After they were married, he grew tired of traveling with the phone company, so he leased a gas station in Bean Blossom where he used to work in high school.
“The first day I took over I think I only took in $10, because he didn’t take care of his customers at all,” Waltman said about the owner. “So when I took over, people started remembering me from before and my business got going really good.”
However, his lease was verbal, not in writing. So after Waltman built the business back up, the owner wanted it back. He was out of a job.
He decided to go into the drywall business. “I would pull in on the jobs and see all these building contractors pull in in their nice pickup trucks, telling everyone what to do, and I thought, ‘Gee, that looks a lot easier than what I’m doing.’ So I went into that, and I found it wasn’t nearly as easy as I thought.”
But he did manage well enough to work on some side businesses. He got his real estate license and worked at Village Realty, then struck out on his own with a friend to form Abe Martin Realty. He sold his half of that business to Dee Percifield, then opened another business, Hills O’Brown Realty, with a friend. They eventually sold Hills O’Brown to Carl Carpenter and Frank Russo.
Waltman became a construction company locals would recommend. He built several homes on Lake Monroe; his son, David, built one for TV anchor Clyde Lee.
The biggest home he ever built was in Martinsville for Charlie Stuart of Stuart-Skillman Olds. The business is now Ray Skillman Automotive.
“(The home) was over $1 million and that was back in the ‘80s. We had it about three-quarters of the way finished — we had about three-quarters of a million dollars in it at the time — and I got a call one night about 10 o’clock from Mrs. Stuart, and she was crying.”
Her “dream house” was on fire. It was a total loss.
Luckily, before the build started he had talked with Stuart about getting builder’s risk insurance. They never learned what caused the fire, so the insurance company had to pay out.
“And then Stuart said, ‘I don’t want anything left from this house on this site.’ We had to tear out all the basement walls, the footings, everything, and start over.”
Heritage
“I think I’ve been in every organization in the county,” Waltman supposes, ticking a few of them off on his fingers: Founding member of the Brown County Community Foundation. Health board. Chamber of commerce. President of the Jaycees. Former director of Morgan County REMC. Lions Club. Habitat for Humanity. One of the early members of the fair board. “There’s probably more than that; I just can’t think of them.”
He was involved in local politics back in the days Democrats were a shoe-in, serving as president of the Brown County Young Democrats and chairman of the central committee of senior Democrats.
“When I was county chairman I remember if you got the nomination in the spring, you were in, and the Republicans didn’t stand a chance. But now it’s the opposite. Democrats can’t win. It’s really changed.”
He tells with pride the story of how he helped Lee Hamilton get elected to the House of Representatives in 1964.
“I campaigned with him all over Brown County. We became real good friends. … He said, ‘If there’s ever anything I can do to help you, let me know.’”
It wouldn’t be too long after Hamilton was sworn in and moved to Washington that Waltman called in that favor.
“I was trying to get the concessions in the Brown County State Park, and the district chairman in Columbus … had his own person who was interested and he wouldn’t sign off on my petition. … I told (Hamilton) what the problem was, and that was on a Saturday.”
On the following Tuesday morning the Congressman met him at the Brown County Courthouse. “He said, ‘I think the state will be calling you to come in and sign your contract.’ And I got a call that afternoon.”
He ran that side business for four years along with his construction business.
“So, anyhow, some politicians stick to their word,” he said.
In his free time, Waltman has enjoyed pheasant hunting for 50 years, tending to a large and productive garden on his 150-acre property, and racing stock cars well into his senior years.
He spends much of his time now with Lois. On Sunday, they’ll mark their 62nd wedding anniversary.
He never left Brown County, just like the generations before him buried in Bean Blossom.
And that thought reminds him of a couple other local landmarks he’s renovated, one of them built by another Waltman.
“William Waltman — but everyone called him Yankee Bill — he’s the one that built the ‘White House’ over where the school office is. … He built that whole thing for $1,650 and the county used it then as the county home for poor folks. And then they closed it down and it sat there empty for several years.
“Well, back in the ‘60s or ‘70s, when we had a lot of hippies around here … the hippies had moved into the basement area of that thing and nobody knew it. … When we did the remodeling there was ashes down there where they had had fires down in the basement of that thing, and I don’t know how they kept from burning it. … And there was like a jail cell down there with the bars on it and the whole works. I guess if they had people down there that were unruly, they would get put in the jail. So I came in and remodeled that thing when the school got it.”
William “Yankee Bill” Waltman was very distant relative, who had a house on the hill “rest park” just past the Bean Blossom Overlook. “At one time they called that Waltman Rest Park, and then I think politics changed and the name got taken off there,” Waltman said. “Wrong politics.”
And there’s one more project he remembers: The time the county hired him to shore up the iconic Bean Blossom Covered Bridge, built in 1880. He had to remove the original stone footings, jack it up and build a new concrete base in the creek bed.
“I had a dream one night when we had that thing just sitting on some timbers. I woke up one night and we were having a terrible wind storm, and I could see that thing just teetering back and forth, and it was so real I had to go over there the next morning just to be sure that it was still there.”
“Anything else I can bore you with?”
[sc:pullout-title pullout-title=”Lee Waltman” ][sc:pullout-text-begin]
Age: 81
Place of birth: His grandparents’ farm on Salt Creek Road
Spouse: Lois. They’ll be married 62 years this Sunday.
Children: Lisa Day, Julie Lee, Ellen Masteller and David Waltman; eight grandchildren and “a bunch of great-grandchildren”
Parents: Myron and Opal (Mead) Waltman
Siblings: Gene, Dorothy and Dale.
Occupations: Telephone technician, gas station operator, drywall contractor, building contractor for 45-plus years.
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This week’s paper features the stories of five Brown County residents who are older than 80, telling their personal histories in the county. Read more in the Yesteryear section starting on page B1.
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