Photo provided Jared Anderson, Bartholomew County Historical Society curator and collections manager, holds the “block” portion of the Irwin Block sign.
December’s devastating downtown fire that consumed the Irwin Block Building put an end to one of the rarest kinds of buildings in Indiana — one that represented the very foundations of Columbus.
It was a heartbreaking end to a landmark that had stood witness to the life of this community for 129 years and was associated with some of our region’s earliest movers and shakers, including the influential Irwin, Sweeney and Miller families.
But as The Republic’s Jana Wiersema reported, the fire wasn’t the last word about the Irwin Block Building, because dedicated preservationists are doing everything they can to retrieve pieces of its unique history and salvage them for future generations.
This is what Jared Anderson, curator and collections manager at the Bartholomew County Historical Society, told Wiersema about what our community lost in the fire: “We think of Columbus having beautiful mid-century modern buildings, but it was great that we had the Irwin Block, being often recognized as … (among) the greatest Queen Anne commercial block buildings anywhere in Indiana.”
Anderson has saved the “BLOCK” lettering that dominated the building’s facade, and the building’s owners will retain the “IRWIN” portion, which even those who knew the building well were surprised to learn were made of metal. Stories above the street, those letters for decades had done a convincing job passing for stone. Examples of stained glass, an antique stove built in Columbus and other unique artifacts also were retrieved from the rubble.
This preservation work was done with urgency because after the fire, the city had ordered the building demolished after it was condemned as unsafe. Within weeks after the fire, demolition crews were on the scene.
But Anderson said Columbus Indiana Architectural Archives Director Tricia Gilson had helped push momentum beginning the morning of the fire to salvage what could be saved from the Irwin Block.
Writing in The Republic on Sunday, Jan. 29, Gilson said she and colleagues including Anderson, Bartholomew County historian Tami Stone Iorio and others immediately began compiling every bit of information they could to help tell the building’s story, and asking the community to help.
“We also agreed that we wanted much more than photographs. Imagine if we had architectural drawings. Or a roster of people who took golf lessons from golf pro John Payne on the third floor, account books from Frank H. Seward’s bicycle repair shop, tools from Cleta Mullineaux’s Beaux Art Beauty Shoppe, an oral history about Fifth Street Yoga,” Gilson wrote.
Gilson wrote that this was part of the “public trust” that collecting organizations hold in our communities, and she’s right. The work these organizations do in collecting our stories and documenting the life of our community is ongoing and essential, and we applaud their efforts. Through them, the Irwin Block and those connected to it will live on.
