Ruthmere: The House Named for a Child
Near South Bend, Indiana
The three-story Beaux-Arts mansion on the Elkhart riverbank is called Ruthmere, and the name is a grief made permanent in stone.
Albert and Elizabeth Beardsley built the house in nineteen ten, commissioning Chicago architect Enoch Hill Turnock to design them a home that reflected their position in Elkhart society. Albert was the nephew of Havilah Beardsley, the man who had founded Elkhart back in eighteen thirty-two. He had come to town as a teenager, made his fortune through starch mills, and invested in the pharmaceutical company that would become Miles Laboratories, known to later generations as the maker of Alka-Seltzer. By nineteen ten, Albert Beardsley was one of the wealthiest men in northern Indiana.
They named the house in memory of their only child, Ruth, who had died at seven months old. In the naming convention of the era, mere referred to water, from the Latin maris, in recognition of the house's position near the Saint Joseph River. Ruthmere: Ruth's water. Every visitor who asked about the name heard the story of the daughter who never grew up.
The mansion became a center of Elkhart social and business life. Albert and Elizabeth Beardsley hosted political gatherings, civic events, and family celebrations there until their deaths in nineteen twenty-four. The house then passed through various hands before the Beardsley Foundation acquired it in nineteen sixty-seven.
Restoration began in nineteen sixty-nine and the house opened to the public in nineteen seventy-three. What visitors find inside is extraordinary: Tiffany glass lamps and windows, sculptures by Auguste Rodin, European paintings, and rooms preserved much as the Beardsleys left them. The mansion was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight.
Elkhart's economy runs on recreational vehicles and musical instruments, it makes more of both than anywhere else in the country. The Ruthmere mansion stands beside that industry as something else: a reminder that the families who built this city had inner lives, private losses, and rooms they filled with beautiful things to make the silence bearable.
