Ruthmere House, Elkhart, IN

Ruthmere House

We continued our return home paying all sorts of tolls, but also stopping in Elkhart Indiana at Ruthmere House. This house was built by Albert and Elizabeth Baldwin Beardsley in 1908. They were one of the founding families of Elkhart and chose a place along the river for their home. The house is very unique in several ways. The interior wood is Cuban Mahogany, the ceilings are all very ornate, much of the original furniture is still there, some of the wall coverings and carpets are still original. The most interesting feature was a rare instrument (only two in the U.S. remain), a choralcello. In the reception room where it is housed it looks like an organ, but in that room, it sounds like a piano, if you go to the parlor, it sounds like an organ, and it sounded like flutes playing in the entry hall. It still works (somewhat) and we got a demonstration using a piano roll to make the music. The house also serves as an art museum including five Rodin sculptures and several Tiffany lamps. We spent the night at one of our favorite campgrounds, Indiana Dunes State Park.

If you would like to see more pictures and video, there is a narrated 12 minute video on youtube. 

From the Ruthmere collection

The rest of the trip is moving a piano and furniture for Laura from Appleton to Minneapolis, visiting with her, Greg, and Mallory, and then heading home.

This was a difficult trip for Mary, she had trouble breathing through a large part of the trip. We visited a lot of things that we typically do, zoo’s, historical interpretation towns, botanical gardens, old houses, and natural history museums. What we found was that we had discovered quite a few interesting new things in each of these, which made the trip quite interesting.