Scribner House: Oldest Building in New Albany
Near Louisville, Indiana
The oldest surviving building in New Albany, Indiana, was built by the same three brothers who founded the city, and they named the city after the capital of the state they left behind.
In eighteen thirteen, Joel, Nathaniel, and Abner Scribner arrived at the Falls of the Ohio River from New York State with a plan to build a town. They called it New Albany in honor of Albany, New York's capital. Joel Scribner felled local ash, oak, and poplar trees to build a frame house on the new settlement's main street, completing it in eighteen fourteen. It is the oldest building in the city. Built in a New England Federal style, it stands two and a half stories tall at one hundred six East Main Street, on the corner of State Street.
The house stayed in the Scribner family until Harriet Scribner sold it to a chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution. The building is now on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as a museum, the best physical record of what New Albany looked like in its founding decade at the edge of the American frontier. It opens to visitors for open houses twice a year, and tours are offered by appointment.
