Over the past two weeks, it’s been looking like the historic Calvin House on East Main Street was coming down, piece by piece.

It is, said owner Ted Deckard. But not in the way you might think.

The house, which was saved last May with a five-figure anonymous donation and the promises of two land owners to relocate it, is being taken apart.

Each part is being inspected to see if it’s salvageable and how it could be reused. Then, once a new foundation is built, the house will be put back together again with a mix of old and new materials.

“It’ll all go completely down, but it’ll go back up,” Deckard said last week.

“Anything of value that we can use and expose, that’s what we’re going to do.”

The little blue house attracted more attention than it had ever received last year, when new land owner Bruce Gould filed for a demolition permit so that he could remove the house and reuse the land for something else.

The Calvin House had been falling in for several years. It had housed several different businesses, but hadn’t had a human tenant in at least 15 years. It also had been added onto on all sides, masking the historic core of it.

Within days of the planned demolition, members of Peaceful Valley Heritage pulled together about $29,000 in donations to stop a backhoe from taking out the whole structure. Gould agreed to pause his short-term plans to build a parking lot for a bit longer, and the backhoe instead carved away the newer parts of the house, leaving the four-room, two-story rectangle that used to be the home of John “Dennis” Calvin.

The Calvins were among the early settlers of Nashville. Family members founded a dry goods store and a hardware and furniture store downtown. Dennis’ grandfather, T.D., was a Civil War lieutenant and served as postmaster in the 1880s; Dennis was elected sheriff twice before World War I.

The house where Dennis lived was built sometime between 1872 and 1882, said James A. Glass, a historic preservation expert who evaluated it last spring. He called it “one of the last buildings associated with the late 19th century” on this section of road, and said it also had historic prominence because the family that built it “played key roles in the retail history of the town.”

“The original house is clearly visible and could be restored after removing the additions,” Glass wrote in a letter to the editor last May.

Last July, two pickup trucks and a skid steer hauled it off the lot where it had been for more than 100 years and dropped it next door by the historic McGrayel house, known as Barnyard Treasures, which Deckard owns. It’s been sitting there, exposed to the elements, ever since.

Last September, Deckard received a certificate of appropriateness from the town to place the Calvin House behind and to the side of Barnyard Treasures, facing Schoolhouse Lane and the Nashville volunteer fire station.

His plan still is to turn it into another tourist rental option, making a total of eight bedrooms between the Barnyard Treasures house and this house, he said last week.

The Nashville Development Review Commission approved that plan — as well as adding a second-floor balcony and replacing the original wood siding with concrete board — last fall.

On June 25, the DRC approved an amendment to that plan from construction manager Mark Snoddy. He wanted the option to put it on a crawlspace instead of a basement to keep costs down, and permission to dismantle the house instead of moving it as it was onto the new foundation because of safety concerns.

“It was going to be torn down, and now basically it’s going to be torn down,” said DRC President Penny Scroggins, wondering aloud about the attention the house would get again.

“This was a big to-do when they wanted to tear this house down and it took up a lot of everybody’s time and energy, and they finally come to where it is now, where it rests now, and now they want to tear it down because it’s not safe. Well, it wasn’t safe when they came before us before.”

“I think it’s tough for everyone,” said DRC member Brandon Harris. “… Last year when we looked at it, the public looked at it as a way to find a win-win for this for everybody. … It’s essentially going to be a new construction.”

Snoddy told the group he thought he could save and reuse 55 to 60 percent of the house.

That’s better than losing the house altogether, said DRC member Jessica George.

“Basically he’s creating something usable that’s still going to look similar to the 1872 house,” said Vivian Wolff from the audience. “It won’t be the same. It was let go a very long time.”

Peaceful Valley Heritage hasn’t decided yet where it stands financially on this project. That will be discussed this week, said member Jim Schultz.

No money was ever transferred to anyone from the donations that came in to save the house last year, Schultz said. “It transferred on expectations they were to meet,” he said about the new owners. Recently, Schultz and other PVH members met with Deckard and the anonymous donor(s) “to try and get some sort of a deal struck where the Calvin House would still exist,” he said.

“We’re waiting on whether or not they agree to our terms, our philanthropy’s terms,” he said about whether or not PVH would be using any of the money it gathered to help Deckard with the project. Those terms likely will include using a period front door, not changing the exterior much except for putting on a small addition, and using some original windows, he said.

Schultz has heard the questions as well: If something is taken apart and then put back together with some new materials and some old, is it really historic, and is it worth saving?

“That question will be answered by the Peaceful Valley board, whether or not our philanthropy wants to stay engaged under the conditions you just described,” he said.

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The town is still without an ordinance that would prevent any historic properties like the Calvin House from being demolished outright, or prevent them from falling into a state of disrepair that would require extensive work to bring them back.

When the demolition of the Calvin House was being discussed last May, Indiana Landmarks and local preservation group Peaceful Valley Heritage gave the town a copy of a historic preservation ordinance that had been tested in court. The town council passed it to the Nashville Development Review Commission to look over.

It has now gone through eight revisions and no version has been approved by any board.

The town council tried three times to pass it this year, but in May, a majority of council members voted to table it until the DRC comes to them with recommendations.

Currently, the town has what has been termed a “demolition delay” ordinance. No board can step in and stop any building, even a historic one, from being taken down; the most the town council can do is require an owner to wait up to 45 days before demolition.

According to draft 8 of the proposed historic preservation ordinance, one or more historic districts would be created in town, and all buildings in the district would be classified as “outstanding,” “notable,” “contributing” or “non-contributing.”

The current DRC would become the Historic Preservation Commission. It would review requests from owners of buildings in the historic district when they wanted to demolish or move a building; make a “conspicuous change” in the exterior, like build an addition or change the color; or do any construction on a building on the property that would be visible from the street.

According to the latest draft, a historic building in a historic district could still be demolished, but first, the owner would have to demonstrate that it is “incapable of earning an economic return on its value,” and the owner could have to wait to demolish it for a minimum of 60 days up to a year. The term would be up to the HPC.

The DRC has guidelines now for the look of business-zoned properties, and an application-review process for when owners want to make changes. But the DRC has no say in what happens with residential properties, including historic ones. The Calvin House is only in its jurisdiction because it is on business-zoned land.

The town does have some control over the way properties look in general. Its nuisance ordinances require owners to maintain all properties to a level that they won’t injure the public, and to cut “weeds and other rank vegetation” around them. But town employees have suggested that the process to get an uncooperative owner to actually do those things needs work. Council members are looking over a draft of a new property maintenance ordinance — separate from the historic preservation ordinance — to see if they want to make changes. Initial feedback from the public on the first draft was not positive.

Historic preservation was one of the reasons that the DRC was created in the first place. It was established in May 2002, around the time that the studio of artist C. Curry Bohm, next door to where the Calvin House used to stand, was demolished. In its place, an office building was built. The owner of that property, Monica “Jean” Kafoure, also owned the Calvin House and the land where it stood until last year, when the Goulds bought it.

Peaceful Valley Heritage still sees a need for more building protections in town — ideally, the ordinance it proposed in the first place.

“You know the way Brown County’s famous for tweaking something and then having to deal with the legal costs for proving that what they want is right,” said Peaceful Valley member Jim Schultz.

“We don’t mind if they amend it and make it specific to this area with the language, but we also saw them seriously weaken the ordinance with some of the changes that they put in place. So our position is still that the (Indiana) Landmarks draft ordinance would probably be in the best interest of the town, just because if they did engage it they wouldn’t have to worry about legal battles.”

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