Joel Ninde and the Wildwood Company

by Tom Castaldi

Have you passed by 1012 West Berry nestled into the northwest corner of Berry and Union streets?  Many of us have, but probably never gave a second thought about of this beautiful, Craftsman style, two-story home that was designed by Joel Roberts Ninde founder of the Wildwood Building Company.  Born on December 21, 1873, Joel was an extraordinary woman of the early 1900s who envisioned a new form of domestic architecture based on the notion of the “House of Convenience.”  Designing homes that were “pleasing to the eye, economical, convenient, and efficient” became the hallmark of her work and that of her architect partner, Grace E. Crosby, and the Wildwood Builders Company.

A native of Alabama, Joel was raised in a traditional fashion and had no formal training in architecture.  She met Lee J. Ninde, a Fort Wayne attorney, in Indianapolis and shortly afterward the two were married.  Joel designed her first house for her new husband.  She refused to live in the Ninde family estate of “Wildwood” because of its dark and drafty appearance.  She envisioned a house that was suited for the person who spent the most time in it, the housewife.

Specializing in Craftsman and Colonial Revival style houses, Joel soon was designing houses on a regular basis and her husband gave up his law practice in 1910 to form the Wildwood Builders Company to develop not only “Mrs. Ninde’s Houses,” as they came to be called, but new types of urban neighborhoods altogether.  “The House of Convenience” upon which she based her designs was a house that blended economical building materials and construction methods with durability and good, modest looks.  It was a house in which the housekeeper was the main focus and a place where handsome individualism was deemed available to the modest home as well as to the affluent.  It was an important beginning in the middle-class dream of home ownership as a source of pride, self-identity, and creativity.  One of her homes is the house at 1012 West Berry Street.

In 1914, the Indianapolis Star reported that Mrs. Ninde had built over 300 houses. Joel’s Wildwood Company supported new ideas in the development of neighborhoods and provided the prototype of modern suburbia in its projects in the Wildwood Neighborhood on the far southwest side of Fort Wayne and in the Lafayette Place Neighborhood in the far south side of the city.  The company’s Wildwood Magazine achieved national recognition for its essays on new techniques for addressing burgeoning urban problems.  Joel Ninde died at the age of forty two on March 7, 1916, after having suffered a stroke.

If you pass by her Lindenwood Cemetery’s west-facing burial plot, you’ll see that next to her stone is one of equal size and shape that marks the resting place of her husband Lee who died in 1953.  On her other side is a smaller stone that has the inscription: “Infant dau. of Lee and Joel R. Ninde – Died May 22, 1906.”

Allen County Historian Tom Castaldi is author of the Wabash & Erie Canal Notebook series; hosts “On the Heritage Trail,” which is broadcast at 6:35 a.m., 8:35 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Mondays on WBOI, 89.1 FM; and “Historia Nostra” heard on WLYV-1450 AM and WRRO 89.9 FM. Enjoy his previously published columns on the History Center’s blog, “Our Stories,” at history centerfw.blogspot.com.

 

More on ways to study history

My husband and I love old houses. Before we moved to Fort Wayne, we lived in a 100-year old home in Kearney NE near what had been in my childhood the junior high school’s football field and prior to that the high school’s stadium. That stadium is long gone, replaced by new housing, but the neighborhood that was built just to the west of downtown remains with an active neighborhood association working to keep the area in tip top shape. Here in Fort Wayne, we live in Wildwood Park, a neighborhood begun in 1916 at the end of the streetcar line. While our house is one of the newer ones in the Park, the oldest is just across the street and it’s nice to live in an area where every house is different in appearance.

As we’ve lost parents, aunts and uncles to death, we’ve started to inherit family memorabilia and furniture. Tom’s family is from upstate New York, and by virtue of being an area that was settled long before my native Nebraska, family objects from his parents tend to be older and have more history. That’s not to say those objects have more value because it’s the history of an object that gives it value. Witness a 1930’s era blue cream pitcher I own that had once been my grandmother’s. According to my mother, those pitchers were premiums given away by a company when she was a child. The company logo is long gone but the creamer is on our coffee table as a penholder. It was on the table for every meal we ate at my grandparent’s house and I don’t intend to ever part with it.

Old houses and family items are an excellent way to teach history to your children. You can research objects via your local library or antique stores. If you know some of the history of an item, such as when it came to the States from Europe, write this information down and keep it with the item or in a spot where it won’t get lost. I have the history of a cake plate that came to Nebraska from England…I hope. But I haven’t seen the history in awhile so I can’t be positive I still have it. That’s why taking care of the information is so important.

You can research the history of your home, in part, through public records. Old newspaper articles and books of photographs can also be helpful. Along the way you may learn something about architecture. We are fortunate here in Fort Wayne to have the Genealogy Center at the downtown public library. What a phenomenal resource!

Once you know how old something is, you can then do some research about the world in that time. Ken Burns’ recent work on the Dust Bowl, for example, can give you a glimpse into the time in which many of our parents and grandparents lived. Novels about a certain time period, biographies of key persons (one of the best ways to study history in my opinion), old movies, etc. give you a feel for a time period that is more than you get from memorizing facts, dates and dead presidents. Right now, I’m reading Madeleine Albright’s book “Prague Winter”, a look at pre-World War II Europe that is almost as good as Erik Larson’s “In the Garden of Beasts”.

If you want your kids to love history, you need to love it too and be creative about how you share that love. It will rub off to a certain extent…trust me on that one!