The Reitz Home, A Lumber Baron's Monument to the Gilded Age

There is a moment, standing on the front walk of the Reitz Home on First Street, when the scale of the Victorian era's ambitions becomes physically apparent. The house rises three stories, crowned with a mansard roof, wrapped in carved woodwork so elaborate it looks more like a piece of cabinet furniture than a building. It was begun in eighteen seventy-one for John Augustus Reitz, and it was built to make a statement that would survive him by generations.

Reitz had amassed a fortune in the lumber business. Timber was one of Indiana's great export commodities in the mid-nineteenth century, before the forests were largely cut, and the money was serious. When he decided to build a home, he hired craftsmen and sourced materials with the same systematic attention he brought to commerce.

The interior woodwork is white oak and cherry and walnut, cut and carved by hands that treated a domestic staircase with the care of a church nave. The Reitz Home today is a museum, and it preserves not just the architecture but the furniture, the wallpapers, the decorative objects, an unusually complete picture of how upper-class American domestic life was organized in the eighteen seventies. The kitchen technology, the parlor conventions, the bedroom arrangements all speak to a world in which a prosperous family maintained a small staff and received visitors according to rituals nearly as formalized as court protocol.

What you see at the Reitz Home is what the Ohio River economy produced at its best: genuine wealth, translated into lasting stone and wood, still standing on the street where it was built.