“Why care that our cultural heritage is slowly being stripped from the hills and hollers of Brown County?
“The simple truth is that it is our responsibility and privilege to honor the memory of those whose lives were spent making Brown County what it has become today. … The truth is that if we choose to stand by and watch as more and more of our historic sites are erased from the land, we will lose the sense of who we are and where we came from.”
On May 15, Dorothy Babcock read that statement, written by local historian Steve Arnold, to the Nashville Development Review Commission. The group had granted a permit to demolish a 100-plus-year-old house on East Main Street, following town ordinances.
On May 21, she stood, beaming, as an excavator carved the debris from around the long-neglected house, revealing the structure that will be saved.
“Wow,” Babcock said. “It’s kind of a whirlwind.”
[sc:text-divider text-divider-title=”Story continues below gallery” ]Within days, members of Peaceful Valley Heritage pulled together thousands of dollars in donations and a plan to move the Dennis Calvin house at 169 E. Main St. from new owner Bruce Gould’s land.
Jim Schultz learned Friday night, May 18, that a $29,000 gift had been made by an anonymous donor to move it one lot to the east. There, landowners Ted Deckard and Tonya Figg will turn it into additional lodging on their tourist home property, Barnyard Treasures.
If a plan hadn’t been formed that weekend, the group would have been watching the whole house get bulldozed instead of just the newer additions on the front and back.
To members of Peaceful Valley Heritage, that would have been a blow to Brown County’s past and future.
“To this day, there are no local history courses in our public schools to tell the story of Brown County’s people,” Arnold wrote. “Historic buildings have been disappearing at an alarming pace for more than 20 years. Other structures are suffering from severe neglect and are being demolished through negligence.
“We think the time has come to change this picture.”
Nashville Town Council members agreed. Upon Schultz’s request, they decided to form a committee and look at a historic preservation ordinance from Indiana Landmarks that would take steps to protect buildings in town.
Nashville’s current ordinances do not allow governing boards to step in and stop a demolition, even if the structures are historic. The most the town council can do is to require an owner to wait 45 days before demolishing anything.
Brown County’s ordinances don’t address historic preservation at all, but the subject is on the Area Plan Commission’s “short list” for revision, said Planning Director Chris Ritzmann.
“Thank goodness,” said resident David Martin, surveying the remains of the Dennis Calvin house last Tuesday night. He had asked the town council for a preservation ordinance more than a decade ago, and he also spoke to the council in April about saving this house.
Some people may look at what’s left and ask, “Was it really worth saving?” he said. But consider the people who lived there.
Dennis Calvin’s grandfather, Timothy Downing Calvin, was among the early settlers of Nashville, coming from southern Ohio in 1854.
One of his sons, T.D. Calvin Jr., owned a dry goods store in Nashville. His ornate home at Van Buren and Franklin streets still stands; the Calvin Place shopping complex is a nod to him.
The middle son, John B. Calvin, built a hardware and furniture store on East Main Street opposite the Brown County courthouse. When he died at age 40, the business passed to his sons, 14-year-old John “Dennis” and 12-year-old William “Duard” Calvin. Duard’s house stood where Peter Grant’s gallery is now and Dennis’ was the blue house on East Main.
Dennis was elected county sheriff twice before World War I.
Duard was immortalized in Frank Hohenberger’s Liars Bench photo taken on the courthouse lawn. He’s on the far right, Martin said. The group of men on the bench is looking at the Calvin hardware store.
The Goulds tried for six or seven years to buy the Dennis Calvin house, which had sat empty and deteriorating for about 15 years, Bruce Gould said. Owner Monica “Jean” Kafoure had plans to raze the house and build an office building there, but the Nashville Development Review Commission at the time wasn’t supportive of that plan. After the last tenant, a beauty shop, moved out in the early 2000s, the house was only inhabited by animals, and the roof and floor on the newer additions had begun to give way.
Gould said he didn’t want to demolish the home either, but keeping it there didn’t make financial sense. Even though the home was assessed at less than zero dollars, taxes alone on the business-zoned land are $500 a month, and he could think of no business he could put in the four-room, two-story historic house with no bathroom that would cover all of its own bills.
While the couple considers what to do with the land in the future — such as building short-term tourist or long-term resident lodging — it’ll become a pay parking lot.
Peaceful Valley Heritage is covering the demolition costs for the newer additions to the house if they go over $25,000, and is paying Gould $2,500 a month — his projected income from parking — until the historic part of the house is moved, he said.
It’s not certain when the moving date is yet.
Gould said that even though this arrangement has made his plans more complicated, it ended up as a win-win-win for him because he gets the extra demolition costs covered, he’ll get needed fill dirt when the house is moved to the neighboring lot, and the house’s new owner has agreed to work with him on correcting drainage issues on his land.
Mark Dollase, vice p{span}resident of preservation services for Indiana Landmarks, told the DRC on May 15 that another step toward a wider preservation effort could be establishing a historic district in Nashville. What exactly that would entail hasn’t been hashed out yet.
Arnold, a local historian and Peaceful Valley Heritage member, has begun compiling a binder of historic properties around the town and county that have been demolished.
In 1995, as part of a statewide project, the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana did an inventory of historic structures in Brown County. By Arnold’s count, at least six significant structures have been torn down since then, including two neighborhood groceries and a one-room schoolhouse, a post office and homes of people important to local history.
“Structures are tangible reflections of the hard work and pride of our earliest settlers who were humble, simple in their lives, and very pious,” Arnold wrote.
“What would the walls say if they could talk? What stories would they tell?”
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While the Dennis Calvin house was being worked on May 21, Peaceful Valley Heritage member Vivian Wolff was bouncing back and forth between two work sites: This project on East Main Street, and a different sort of excavation on the west edge of town.
Wolff and other volunteers from the Brown County Cemetery Preservation Society spent the Monday before Memorial Day in Southview Cemetery, in the area of Jackson Branch Road.
They trimmed brush, uncovered five or six stones that were hidden by plants, and made a list of 20 stones that need to be repaired. Six others were badly leaning and 22 stones were missing or buried, according to a report by volunteer Rhonda Dunn.
They also cataloged the graves of two doctors, six veterans — two of them from the Civil War, two state senators, one state representative and 12 other “notable Brown Countians.”
Washington Township Trustee Brandon Magner organizes the mowing of this and other township cemeteries, and he provided the group with tombstone cleaner, Dunn said. Under state law, it’s township trustees’ responsibility to care for cemeteries that do not have active associations caring for them, no matter how old they are.
These volunteers work opened up a “neglected” part of the cemetery so that mowers will be able to get in and maintain it, Dunn wrote. The group also is planning to do another work day in the same cemetery in the fall.
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