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Actually, I've never worked on a building like this.

It's amazing what they could do 100 years ago, John was just a simply a natural born entrepreneur.

When you're in someone's home and you think about the history that took place in their home.

And each room has its own special decor.

Youre standing in the room.

That was Mr. Bass's bedroom that will become the president of the university Sister Elises office when the building is complete.

Heidi, can you explain what the guys are doing and.

Sure.

The walls have been removed of their previous covering.

It was that deteriorated because of the age of the building.

Right now, we are putting the sample on.

Applying the different colors.

The goal of the project is to retain as much of the original artwork that is here so the flowers are conserved.

It started with Chuck Knox coming in and doing the restoration or the actual investigation of paint services and getting us down to basic colors for each of the rooms.

And in the process we found stencils and piece of pieces of art that we didn't know existed because it had been painted over, etc.. Look at the hallway down here now, and we've got these cream light colored walls all over and then we've got these dark brackets up top up there.

And what we found out by getting the original color is these brackets are much lighter than that.

Right now, kind of a of an ivory color with a glaze over the top of it.

And then we know that our hallways going to be that dark green with our big 30 inch, 36 inch stencil over the top.

That by far was out of all my years of stenciling, probably the hardest stencil I had to do.

Not only was it just mathematically difficult, it was also difficult because it was a base coat and in another paint, eggshell paint over that, followed by two glazes and then followed by a fourth paint.

So between the two flats, the two glazes, try not to have any overlap, try not to have anything get out of place with going around all the corbels, all the inside corners, outside corners, having it mirror each other, going down the hallway that it definitely had me pull my hair out.

This historical masterpiece nestled amongst the 108 acre complex of the University of Saint Francis, would not have been possible without the exquisite taste of one of Fort Wayne's most influential entrepreneurs, John H. Bass.

His country estate, known as Brookside, is where the spirit of the Bass and Leslie families endures.

And this esteemed university has made the commitment to protect and nurture this spirit.

The legend begins in the hills of Salem, Kentucky, where John Henry was born in 1835, to Simon and Jane Dodd, Bass.

There were three siblings, all unique in their own way, and as most siblings do, they leave the nest.

But John wasn't the first one to venture out to greatness.

It's easy to think of John Bass as a rags to riches story that kind of like Horatio Alger, the poor man who comes to Fort Wayne and makes it rich.

But actually the Bass family was of middle class stock that came from Salem, Kentucky, And the father, whose name was Sion Bass, had a large farm and was a merchant, and the family was solidly middle class.

The eldest son was Sion St Clair Bass, and he came to Fort Wayne first in 1848 and he became involved in the foundry business and founded a company called the Jones Bass Company.

And it was a prosperous company and it got going into the 1850s and then he sent for his younger brother, John Henry, in 1852, with the success established by Sion Bass.

His parents could see that Fort Wayne presented unlimited opportunities for their children.

So 16 year old John Henry, by means of stagecoach and Canal boat, ventured forth.

Little did Fort Wayne know how much Sion and John Henry Bass would shape their future.

Soon after, John Henry arrived, he found work as a grocery store clerk.

Being an ambitious, budding entrepreneur.

He studied accounting in the evening.

Well, his studies paid off.

By 1853, John Bass was hired by successful contractors Samuel and William Edsel, and he worked for his brother Sions company from 1854 to 1857.

Edsel brothers William and Samuel.

And they had a railroad line that they had run up to the Wabash River.

And then he goes to work as an accountant for his brother, Sion.

And Sion, meanwhile, is the head of the family and is making good money.

And he sells his company to the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne, Chicago Railroad.

And this is towards the end of the of the 1850s.

And John, meanwhile, is still looking to establish himself and he sees limited possibilities of making big money in Fort Wayne.

But there was a lot of opportunity in the West at that time.

A lot of new land was opening up and it was inexpensive Iowa, the Dakotas.

And he went out there in 1857 with some money that he'd saved and started buying cheap government land and and bought a substantial amount of it.

And by the time he returned to Fort Wayne, he had tripled his investment and he had something like $50,000 worth of bought land, which was a substantial amount of money by modern standards.

And so then he was poised to to really get into the Fort Wayne business world.

After two years of successful real estate dealings.

He returned to Fort Wayne with enough capital to purchase a canal line, which was in operation until the railroads came along, and he embarked upon the industry that would come to bear his name and impact the nation.

In 1859, John H. Bass and Edward L Force created Bass and Force a foundry and machine shop.

Bass and Force had $20,000 on their books within the first year of production.

A year later, Bass and Force took on a new partner, Judge Samuel Hanna.

This arrangement grew the company for a few years until Judge Hanna sold his interest to John H. In 1863, giving John sole ownership of the Fort Wayne Machine Works located on Superior Street.

This further ingrain John H. Bass in the business world as an iron works icon.

Sam Hanna was the primary business entrepreneur of early Fort Wayne and John was of the next generation, and Sam Hanna was involved in almost every kind of mercantile activity at that time.

And so he gave John some venture capital to continue.

The Fort Wayne machine works.

And so during the Civil War and they started manufacturing axles and wheels for railcars.

And and as the rails were expanding, they needed to transport troops, they needed to build rail cars.

So it was the perfect time to be in business.

And and John made the most of it.

Meanwhile, in 1861, the Civil War is raging.

Sion Bass, who felt a calling for his country, resigned his business responsibilities in Fort Wayne to help organize the 30th Indiana Volunteer Infantry.

As colonel of that regiment, he led his command in one of the charges on the second day of the Battle of Shiloh.

He, along with many other brave soldiers, gave up their lives that day.

The bass family suffered a great loss.

The Civil War was a period of economic boom in Fort Wayne, in the North, generally.

They managed to get to the point where you had a virtual monopoly.

He advertised himself as the largest car wheel works in the world.

And the thing that's generally forgotten nowadays is that the Fort Wayne operation was the tip of the iceberg of an industrial empire.

1869, he purchased something called the Saint Louis Wheel Company.

And this was a major manufacturing plant for wheels.

And he goes down to Alabama and starts buying up mines for iron mines and has like 20,000 acres of land, I think, in Alabama.

And then he buys land in Tennessee.

And so he starts diversifying and he buys it.

And then in 1873, there was a Great Depression in America.

And for many people that was a discouraging.

But Bass saw a foundry come available for sale in Chicago, and he buys it, sort of to the surprise of people who say that's you shouldn't be doing that.

And but he saw the wisdom of doing that, and it greatly increased his output.

So by the 1870s, they basically cornered the market on axles and wheels for rail cars.

And they were making them all across the country.

And it became very wealthy because of it.

By 1898, John H. Incorporated the company as the Bass Foundry and Machine Works with a capital of $1.5 million, which was later increased to 2 million.

The complex stretched along 20 acres next to the Pennsylvania Railroad on South Hanna Street.

The foundry created jobs for thousands over the years, which naturally led to the significant growth of the Fort Wayne community.

In the meantime, another empire of sorts was developing in Germany.

The Sisters of Saint Francis of Perpetual Adoration.

This order of nuns will become the means by which the Bass family legacy lives on.

We started in of Germany Westphalia area in 1863.

Mother Maria Teresa of Basel was the foundress.

She began a community that really worked with home nursing and care of orphaned children.

And in the Franciscan tradition, she wanted a Franciscan rule.

In 1875, we sent our first six sisters to the United States because at that time in Germany, there was the period of the Kulturkampf with Chancellor Bismarck, who forbade any religious communities to expand and gain members and open their ministries.

So instead of dying, you know, we were invited by Bishop Dwenger to come to the United States.

Lafayette, Indiana was on the Diocese of Fort Wayne.

And so our sisters came to Lafayette.

Within the first year that the sisters arrived, they started a small hospital, Saint Elizabeth.

The original building is still standing.

That complex grew to incorporate a hospital and our headquarters of our community, our mother house.

And they had a high school and they had a school of nursing and they had a college.

Saint Francis College, which we use our founding date is 1890, started as a training school for Sisters for Education.

The college at the time was the Saint Francis Normal School, a two year teacher training institution.

As the sisters were building their religious community in Germany, John Henry Bass acquired his most valued asset, his wife, Laura Holton Lightfoot from Kentucky.

They were married in 1865.

He met her when she was 18 and he was 30.

And the family story is he took he was at a ball down in Kentucky and saw her and said, I'm going to marry that girl.

She got his attention, at least, and she she agreed to kind of court him.

And he promised her if she married, he'd build her a castle.

This is the castle, if you will.

John and Laura both started their married life, living in a townhouse at the corner of Westbury and Fairfield Avenue.

They had two children.

Laura Grace was born in 1872 and John Henry in 1880 with his growing family.

And success came the start of the construction of Brookside in 1887.

What started as a summer vacation home became a grand architectural landmark on a 300 acre tract of land.

It took four years to complete in 1887.

He decided he would like to have a little country getaway.

And so he built a frame house out here.

The original name Brookside is simply that the 300 acre tract of land that John Bass bought in 1887 had a stream running through it.

And he wanted to create a nice, idyllic landscape for his country retreat.

So he dammed it and he created Mirror Lake, which still wraps around the house on two sides.

And then in 1893, there was an item in the paper that indicated that he was having that house clad in sandstone.

I mean, the sandstone was unbelievable on how they rustled those, you know, all the machinery we have today and the lifts and the cranes and the laws.

And I mean, you got to think back.

There was nothing there was horse drawn block and tackle.

The style of Brookside is an outstanding example of Richardsonian Romanesque architecture.

Some characteristics are sculpted shapes and the use of heavy masonry walls rounded square or polygonal shaped towers with conical roofs.

The architectural firm of Wing and Mahurin was commissioned for this project because of their reputation of mastering this Romanesque style.

Many courthouses in Indiana and Fort Wayne City Hall were among the samples in their portfolio.

The Bass Mansion Commission was one of their finest works.

The architectural elements, both on the interior and the exterior, have a lot to do with with why it is significant for architecture.

Details like the carved stonework on the fireplace, the use of stained glass, and then all of the interior decorative items as well.

The murals, the carvings, the floors with the inset inlaid wood designs.

All of it has a bearing on what makes the building architecturally significant.

The sculptural program on the outside of Brookside is very much typical of the Richardsonian Romanesque.

You know, it's just the case that the historical models for the that the styles based on are by and large cathedrals.

And so you have the guardian spirits along the roofline and you have a lot of iconography that derives from religious motifs, plant forms, even a little bit of Islamic influence.

The library of on the first floor of the Bass mansion was originally designed so that on a winter day, the south sun would come in through the windows, giving you a warm place to sit, read a good book, maybe watch the snow outside.

But buildings has to work for for what the user needs them to do.

And in this case, the Bass mansion desperately needed access to the second and third floors.

So there was need to put an elevator and the way the architects did that in this building is delightful.

They've retained the window openings.

And we now have this wonderful way of telling the story of the Bass mansion, and then it comes into where the new elevator is.

By doing that, they actually retained the original fabric and tower get more right here.

I'm showing this three foot to the center of the column right there.

108 years ago.

They just excavated down till they found the clay.

And then they would lay a piece of limestone down approximately two feet wide, and then they would lay off of that.

That was their footing.

Well, today's codes, obviously, there were three foot Malone Towers, right around three foot to 42 inches below frost line.

So we had to shore all that up and cut holes in the walls, which were approximately anywhere from one area was three foot thick.

Another area was 25 inches thick and one area through a corner down there through an older building was five foot thick.

And once they removed all the and then we would have brought a crane in and we would stick our means in to shore the house and then we could finish excavating on the outside, underneath the beams, all the way down another couple of tracks.

All of the dirt were removed just so we could put a foundation for the elevator itself.

And in every floor on the way up for cutting penetrations or we'd run any of the flooring itself is 15 inches thick right now.

We're drilling some holes that are going through a 24 inch thick wall.

And what's going to happen is from the outside, we're going to run a wire that has diamond beads on it.

It's going to come through the halls, it's going to go down and it's going to come through the bottom hole and it's going to go back outside onto a pully system.

And that wire is going to spin around and cut that section of Wall.

The family spent weekends away from the city in their small farmhouse on the property where Brookside was being built.

The farm was of a grand scale, which was expected of John Bass.

He raised the typical chickens and turkeys.

His barns were filled with prize winning cattle and fine riding horses, and the Fort Wayne area benefited from the Brookside Dairy.

We had Brookside Dairy, what it was called, and when the flood of Fort Wayne occurred, the Clydesdale horses were the only thing to get milk to the people in Fort Wayne.

They were the only thing that could get through the river.

When the mansion was complete.

This farmhouse became the farm manager's residence.

My grandfather actually worked at the farm.

He had come from England and been a cowboy out west and Mr. Bass hired him because he was knowledgeable about the Galloway cattle.

Then Mr. Bass liked to raise.

So my mother grew up in the farmhouse across the road.

She and my mother, future mother in law, were friends going through their teenage years that my mother in law always hoped that my mother would marry one of her brothers, but she didn't.

But I knew my husband, who is one of John Bass's great grandsons.

We knew each other as babies because our mothers were friends.

So I used to come and play in this house when I was very small.

This is the library.

There's just a library.

Library table that ran from about here.

Over here was huge and had a cloth.

Maybe it was sent over for a had cloth created over the time that kids could hide it really well.

I spent a good fraction of my childhood up until I was about nine or ten years old when my grandfather died visiting and playing in the house with cousins, some of whom were residents at the time.

At the turn of the century, John H. Bass was enjoying his Brookside and slowing down a bit in his business ventures.

This was a bittersweet time as his promising young son John Jr, became seriously ill. John Henry, being financially able, hired local physician Dr. Gaylord Leslie to care for his son.

It was during this time that Laura Grace Bass and Dr. Leslie became acquainted and began their courtship.

Sadly, the very young John Bass Jr died on August 7th, 1901.

Two years later, Laura Grace and Dr. Gaylord were married.

He ended up being a great assistant to the family because of his not only medical knowledge, but his business knowledge.

And he was able to step up and help with the business.

And by this time, John Henry Bass had gotten involved in a variety of ventures.

He was on the boards of a variety of banks in town.

He continued to have a stake in the railroad, the Street Railroad Company and and Gaylord Leslie really helped help manage the companies.

As the family was grieving the loss of their son and celebrating the engagement of their daughter to Dr. Leslie.

Tragedy struck again on February 11th, 1902.

A steam boiler exploded in the basement, causing a fire that virtually destroyed Brookside.

It was said that the total loss was $150,000, of which $110,000 was covered by insurance.

Mr. Bass commissioned Wing and Mahurin and again to rebuild his Brookside.

This time it was designed to be completely fireproof.

The original budget was said to be $5,000.

The House actually cost 15,000.

Now, that house burned down a couple of years later and was replaced by this one on the same foundations.

Although the major change being that in order to avoid future fires, this house was entirely built out of masonry and concrete, including the floors.

And this house, this final version of the house, cost about $82,000.

So there was a significant increase in cost between the first and the second version of the House.

The interior design of Brookside was said to be influenced by the family's travels.

Decorators from Marshall Field and the Mandel Brothers of Chicago, the most sought after decorators of the time, furnished the rooms in elaborate style.

Many architectural and artistic styles were used throughout the home.

English Tudor, Italian, French and Byzantine, to name a few.

Mrs. Bass has a number of periods represented in the in the building from room to room to room.

Periods of art.

And I think it would be a great example for people to come and look at what does Moorish design look like in comparison to the Napoleonic period or some other period or the Romanesque period.

I mean, we have a living example of architecture on our campus that we can use as an educational resource.

Grace Leslie Dickerson mentions that supposedly the Basses had visited Kensington Palace in London and they'd seen a hunter scene mural, and they decided they had to have a hunter scene mural in their dining room.

Well, the one in Kensington, the boar hunt they decided they didn't want to boar hunt, so they made it a stag hunt, the dining room, the Holslag murals.

Now, Edward Holslag was a German who thought the only thing I can find that he painted big time was in the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress.

So he was with that huge group of muralists that painted at the Jefferson Building, the Library of Congress.

So he came from there to here.

He painted the dining room.

He is said to be painting the rotunda mural up in the in the third floor of the ballroom up there.

And he is also to have painted the murals in Mr. Bass's den that we were all looking at with the red walls.

And so that's a very important set of decoration there, just because the artist who did it, we are doing conservation cleaning on this mural and figure out what will take the dirt off, not the paint.

So that was a whole process in itself.

It's previously been touched up after the original, and so after I'm done cleaning it, basically I try to get some consistency with the color, do a little touch up, work on it.

It was originally a silver leaf mural.

Um, we had abandoned the four big windows in the library from the elevator shaft.

When those were windows, there was this massive radiator that sat in front of the windows and in the ground there was this two by two grate.

That went to the basement.

We remove the radiator because we didn't need any more because the windows weren't on an outside wall.

And then the guy that did the floors said, Well, I can take that to be too great on the floor.

You never know it was there.

So I'd like to see that.

So, uh, Ralph Basky and I all but dared him, you know.

Okay, let's see it.

And I don't think anyone will be able to tell that that was there was all this will be all refinished, all this wood.

You can see certain areas done by the registers where we have actually repaired some of the wood and put a a sealer on there.

So we'll get damaged anymore during construction.

But some of these areas we have to actually repeat in the same exact way we're doing the mosaics and to all back to original and then this all this will be all strip sand and resealed back to all its original, original beauty.

The Packard Piano Company built the staircase, the spiral staircase that's in the foyer area.

And for people to understand how artisans were brought in to do that, you wouldn't think of piano company building a staircase, but that that's what happened here.

With the reconstructed Brookside complete this 24,000 square foot home quickly filled up with Dr. Gaylord Leslie and his wife, Laura Grace, their five children, John and Laura Bass and John's parents, SIon and Jane Bass.

When John H. And Laura were in the original master bedroom, this must have been where my grandmother and my grandfather shared a room together because this of the bedrooms.

This is the largest and most ornate after the master bedroom.

And if you remove your measurement on the floor, this is actually bigger than the one that is a major part of the master bedroom.

Part of the master bedroom.

And it has, I think, the best view to the right and all the good parts.

Our grandfather was the third eldest child marries first and the second John came third, then came Grace and then came Gaylord.

By then that was three generations still living in the family.

Mr. Basss parents, Mr. and Mrs. Bass, their daughter, their grandchildren.

I remember Mary always being a tremendous flirt everywhere we went, and she would say things to the gentleman that we would come across that I could only describe as gushing over them.

Mary was the fun one.

Linda was very serious most of the time.

Most of the time she did have a sense of humor, but she had a really pay attention.

Grace always had this little bit of racy side to her character where she liked being an artist.

You know, she was a little more bohemian.

She liked fast cars.

You know, She you know, they always had a little bit of a daring edge or a little bit of something that I admired.

My mother in law had gone to art school and at the Chicago Art Institute before she was married.

And she actually used the solarium.

Mary at the end of the dining room was her art studio, and she painted a lot.

One of my favorite rooms in the whole building is actually one of the ones that simple and plain compared to the others.

But that's deceptive.

This was a room that was originally a solarium, a place for plants to grow in the wintertime, a place to bring the sunshine in.

But but even in this very simple room, we've got wonderful tin ceilings.

All of the windows are curved and the walls themselves are curved.

And the door that actually brings you into the room is itself a curved door.

The details, again for a very simple space, a utilitarian space, are extraordinary and part of what makes the architecture so significant in this building.

Grace Leslie would have a dinner party for the blind and disabled and pull out the best crystal, the best linens, the the best, the china, the China, everything, the silver, everything.

As if she would have a dinner party for anyone else because they were our honored guests.

They always ate in the dining room.

My mother tells the story of my grandfather.

Bass.

My grandfather Bass loved bacon.

Being a good Southern gentleman, he never came to the dinner table without his plate of bacon.

Now, today, that would be a no no.

And here's a man who lived to 87 years old with his plate of bacon, but the grandchildren would come around and Grandpa, can I have a piece of bacon?

I of course, they would always give the children a piece of bacon.

The chairs in the dining room that are around the table are the original chairs from the dining room.

And we have photographs that you can even, you know, see that they are exactly the same.

My goal is for when people come in and they walk through the house and tours or just, you know, enjoy a room that they see a piece or two or a piece of artwork that would be period or even original to the house.

Rooms were basically classified as even either having artwork in them that needed to be restored or areas in the building that were just turned over to general painters.

And so once those decisions were made, then it came down to working with both entities, using the information that Chuck had gleaned going to identify with the actual colors of the original paintings, paint swatches for each of the rooms, all the photographs that we have are black and white.

So it was, you know, a real investigation of the surfaces that led us to to understand the colors on top of this drawing of over with this wheel and sort of looks like a spur from a cowboy boot and it makes lots of little holes.

Then I place that in the position where it's to be on the ceiling and Robert with a LB pad, which is basically filled with charcoal, that leaves all of the dots behind you paint within the dots.

It gives you your whole design on the ceiling and all of the ceiling is gone from basically this little corner.

It's a flip flop pattern.

What's been your most difficult part of the project?

It would have to be making the mold through all the new molds you made for the different cornices, and the ones were damaged by the water damage and and making the mold for the brackets.

First, you want to spray this with Pam or Skillet spray so it doesn't stick, and then it takes several coats of paint or you paint the rubber on and you have to let it dry thoroughly.

It takes about eight coats and then you peel that off and you have to make a little form box to set that in so it fits perfectly.

And then you pour full plaster and let it set up and you have your mold.

It'll set up in the mold in about a half hour.

You can take it out.

But with that second plaster, it takes it several days to dry, to clear out.

You just have to stand it down and fine tune it and then stick it on the wall molding, plaster, brick.

Like most of the rooms in Brookside are adorned with a fireplace, but not just any ordinary fireplace.

There are 13 in all, each inspiring the decor of the room pink marble, iridescent mosaic tiles, South African onyx, African marble and Venetian tile are just a small sampling.

This one's going to be a fun one.

We're going to have to clean all this marble, scrub it down by hand with the marble cleaners and.

And then we have, after we get this all done and cleaned, we've already replaced tiles on here, which I'll take this off, because this is where we replace some already.

Believe it or not, this whole corner's been.

This whole corner here has been rebuilt.

He's kept those pieces individually out of other tiles that he brought on site, cut each individual little piece and laid them in quite time consuming around the fireplace.

Those were really important in our restoration of this project because almost all of the colors that we that were in the base paint were reflected in the fireplace at some place or another.

And so, you know, understanding how the designed mind works is a is a incredible lesson and gift.

The fireplace and Bass's office looks right off of a cover of Jimi Hendrix album, if you take just two small pieces of it and we had a really hard time matching that quality and sheen of a of a tile.

So in some cases, if you visit the mansion, you'll see all these banding of colors and textures and tones.

In some cases, you'll notice that we had to take out the entire band so you couldn't catch with the human eye individual tiles that we replaced.

Yeah, Yeah.

In the early 20th century, having electric light fixtures in a home was an extravagance.

Only enjoyed by a few.

This was a time when a bare light bulb was a status symbol.

This is the billiard light.

So there's a ring of lights up here.

So we're going to we're basically going to remove that ring and then I'll just go in storage if they ever want to put it back to its original configuration, then everything's there.

And that's the other thing.

When you're working on things like this, you want to try not if somebody wants to change something, you want to try to do it in such a way that if they want to take it back to its original state, that they can do that, that you haven't destroyed or compromised the piece to the extent that it can never be taken back to what it was originally meant to be best.

That is a power player from the beginning.

So these light fixtures are purely electric fixtures that are not combination gas, electric the way people would have had in Fort Wayne.

Originally the light plants ran arc lights for street lighting and people liked the quality of the electric light better than the gas light.

But the power was only on the hours of the day.

The streetlights were on, so they had their combination of gas, electric fixtures, the Back 40.

At that time it was the Fairway Restaurant in 1950 and it operated there for 25 years and then it moved to this location in 1975.

This was 1951.

A local antique dealer drove by in his truck, showed me where he had just picked up this chandelier and wanted to know if I was interested in buying it.

It was a beautiful thing and I had a place for it.

So I bought it.

So then it was later that I realized the Azar's owned the Back 40 Junction restaurant.

So I had had George come out couple of times and invited him, first of all, to see the house, you know, so he could see what we had in mind here.

And then a second time again to show him where we would like to put the new fixture, if you would contribute it to if they would contribute it to the university.

And they did.

So George was gracious.

All he was asking in return was that we give scholarships to the value of the the chandelier that now hangs in the former.

So we have yet to figure out the total value.

It's probably very expensive.

The Back 40 Restaurant in Decatur, it was housed there for years and and they had donated light back and and we went down and took it out.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

When we got there, I think the first thing somebody told me that the price on it was irreplaceable and is replaceable.

So that kind of took us up a little bit, but I think it took a four of us to take it down, even to include it.

So and then once I got it, I looked at it for a while, why we were taking it down.

Every time I looked at it, I seen something really unique with that light fixture.

It is something special and a beautiful chandelier and I would say one of a kind.

It's a glad and sad day.

But I think it was a good idea to return the chandelier there to its original home.

This one is going to be really interesting to work on because I have I have to be able to all the electrical is right here.

Okay.

The wires run up through here, through his arm, out his back and into this area here.

Okay.

So I have to have access to this area.

So because of its size and weight, you know, I can't just lay it down on the floor and start pulling parts off.

Not only did I have, you know, a hundred years of of dirt and grime and and whatever, but you know, being in a restaurant, you can imagine what it looked like.

And then when we we actually saw it starting to come to life and getting down to the basics of the surfaces of the original fixture, it was it was simply amazing, I think, out of this whole job, that's that light fixture.

I mean, of course, all the wood work and all the glass, but that light fixture there surprised them that stick in my mind.

That was a unique and it was an awesome light fixture along with the coveted electric lights and gas fireplaces.

Another luxury of the time was steam heat.

Many rooms in Brookside have exposed steam pipes as a testament to this lavish comfort.

At that time, that was as neat of something to show off to friends as as possible.

And the guy had lights in every room, gas fireplaces and radiators, every had steam heating in every room.

I mean, why would you hide that?

That's that's definitely something you would brag about at a party.

So I think you just have to understand not only the functionality of the room, but the time it was occurring.

The biggest challenge was getting piping to all the individual rooms because they all have their own cooling units.

So what we had to do last summer, one of the first things we did is go on site in what we call a trench, the walls.

We came in with a trench and literally cut channels everywhere from every room, had some sort of trenching in it so that we could bury the piping and repair the walls and plaster over them.

It's not like today's construction.

When you have a cavity, you know, you have a stud built wall and there's a cavity where you can fish lines.

You cannot fish lines anywhere in this house.

Everything is blocked.

Concrete, tile and plaster.

The cooling system that we installed here, we're cooling that system with water out of the lake or well water from well down by the lake.

Can you talk a little bit about how we got that from the well down at the lake up to the building here?

Yeah, In the scope of work, we had the directional bore, two, three inch lines from the well in the lake up to the building, and then core drilled through a two and a half foot wall to get them into the building.

The well water lines are, are to cool the condensers for the cooling system instead of the condenser sitting outside and looking big and ugly.

They're sitting in the basement and and they're cooled by water instead of air.

I think we all learned a lot in how to work with specialized consultants.

This kind of project requires doing paint hours and restoration of woodwork and floors and decorative painting and so on.

It's a project that requires a whole different set of craftsmen to do it correctly.

We were very careful about who we invited to give us prices on various aspects of the work.

We look carefully at qualifications, kind of the rule of thumb that I kept in mind as we were doing this was that if we do our job really well, you'll never know we were here.

That what we've inserted into the building will be done in such a way that, that it won't intrude on the on the history of the building.

Now obviously there are exceptions.

You know, we have to have things like fire alarms and call boxes and things like that that are that code is going to require when we try to try to work with those in a sensitive way and when you look at the detail and the the the fantastic ornamentation of the building, some of those things really tend to kind of blend away and very little becomes intrusive in the end.

So again, it's our it's our hope that when we're done, when the public comes in and sees the finished product, there'll be very little evidence that we ever here.

Yet the building will have air conditioning that it never had and it will have the data systems and all the things that will allow the university to use it as a modern building.

We are accustomed to seeing the fruits of our our ideas.

And three months ago you could see everything we did, the trenching in the walls, the piping, the mechanical systems.

As of this last week, you can see a couple spots here and there, but for the most part, it's all gone through.

There's a lot of pride, I think, on site by the guys that did that.

I know there is, but it is a little self, a little deflating, too, to know that our our primary goal is to make it look like we never were here beyond foundries, machine shops and mines.

John H. Bass, being the savvy entrepreneur, was well diversified to list a few other interests.

He was one of the organizers of the Packard Piano Company.

He fulfilled the mass transportation needs of the city with the first horse drawn trolley system.

For more than 40 years, John H. Served on the boards of Old National and Hamilton Banks.

He was honored as a third degree Mason and was a lifelong member of the First Presbyterian Church, simply a well-respected businessman.

John Bass died in 1922 after a long illness.

His wife, Laura, most appropriately honors him in her words.

John H. Bass won success and fortune for himself, but he brought great good to his city.

His years were well spent, but at the time he died in 1922, the newspapers speculated that his fortune was somewhere between five and $6 million.

And if you convert that into modern dollars, that's if you use 6 million as the figure, that's something like $10.6 billion.

Now, this left his business affairs to Dr. Leslie and the newly widowed Laura Holton Bass.

The century was changing dramatically.

The Depression era of the thirties washed over the country and the railroad companies were losing ground to the motor freight industry, causing the Bass Foundry to lose its hold in the industry out of the desire for the employees to keep their jobs, Mrs. Bass tried desperately to keep the payroll going.

She couldn't bear losing the business that her husband spent a lifetime building, but she succumbed to pneumonia in 1935.

Dr. Leslie was left with no choice.

In 1941, the Bass Foundry and Machine works was no more.

He died just two years later.

By the early 1940s, Dr. Leslie passed away, and he was.

He was the last person who really had a handle on on continuing to being able to continue to manage the affairs of the whole Bass empire, which by that time was pretty much in tatters.

It's the 1940s wartime, and the Sisters of St Francis must find a new home.

The college evolved in 1939 from the St Francis Normal School, a two year teacher training institution in Saint Francis College, a four year college granting bachelor's degrees.

Up to this time, Sisters had been the only students attending the normal school after the expansion.

The decision was made to admit lay women into the college, The property in Lafayette, where the sisters first came, eventually expanded to a full city block, and within that block there was the offices, the headquarters of the order, a hospital, the college, a girls high school, and and it was just packed.

And the sisters, of course, who were trying to get accreditation for the college and they were told they could not have accreditation until the college had its own campus.

And so and the year before, the Mother house moved out to relieve the congestion.

At the same time, the Bass's granddaughter, Grace Bass Leslie, made the decision to sell Brookside.

She was in Ill health, city taxes were high, and World War Two was making it impossible to find household help.

Brookside was just too much to manage alone with both the Mother House and the college in need of a new home, Bishop John Francis Noll started to look for properties first.

The Motherhouse was moved to the Carlisle Estate near Mishawaka, Indiana, in 1943.

Then in 1944, the bishop, along with the dean of Saint Francis College, had heard about the Bass Mansion property, the purchase of the 65 acres of land, along with the 36 room mansion was made the first, then arrived at the mansion on August 25th, 1944.

The opening of the fall quarter was September 16th, with an enrollment of 178.

This was the initiation of the current day, University of Saint Francis.

We closed the deal in June of 1944 for $60,000, which is a deal.

And then but the Bass family didn't leave right away.

The sisters came in August but were not able to get entrance into the building because of Bass family was still living here and they had a sale of their items that went on till about August 15th.

I think some of the neighbors were very relieved.

I have heard, because there was some talk about turning it into a home for delinquent boys and of course, the neighbors and all the people around there weren't crazy about that.

So I think the general neighborhood was happy when it was decided.

The sisters decided to buy it.

Sister Ida and, Sister Constance and I and Sister Maxine, the four of us came on the train from Lafayette, Indiana.

We had the first load up the truck was going to bring all of our belongings here.

Some of the neighbors and their neighbors and only sisters would try to move a college in wartime.

You can imagine moving a library, moving out labs with test tubes and all of that, all of that.

There were really no able bodied men to be had, you know, So it was it was quite an ordeal moving the college.

We had rags and soap and all those things.

So we had to start cleaning in the basement first and work up.

But that only gave us two weeks before school opened.

The sisters lived in this building.

It was the convent, it was classrooms, it was the chapel, it was the administrative offices, it was the library.

It was everything.

I've heard tales from some of the older sisters about how how difficult it was.

And they were poor.

They didn't have a lot of money.

Stories about getting food from the mother house, chickens and vegetables and potatoes and things to feed themselves and the students.

This is the room where we first set up the library and all both sides.

And Sister MAXINE and I got a first experience in setting up a library.

The chapel was there, the kitchen, the cafeteria.

A sister ran the kitchen, the ballroom on the third floor.

That was the music department who we had dances for the students upstairs in the ballroom, but we stayed up to night too late that first time, and we couldn't go up there anymore for the dance and curfew.

We had a curfew.

It was a very good education.

I think I find almost everyone of that generation is saying, as small as we were, as as limited as the facilities were, we received an excellent education here and were able to go out and compete well on the job market or with people from larger universities.

Our great Grace lessons Mother went to school here.

And quite proud of it.

She even taught here for a while and she I mean her diploma here.

She is very proud of graduating from the school she was raised in.

It's a place is very dear to my heart because not only did I go there as a layperson, but I found my vocation there and I came back there as a sister, never dreaming that I would teach there someday and then or that I would be president.

So I always said my heart is nailed to a tree there.

So we're when we see our humble beginning, you know, in all the and to see now how it has improved and growing, it just makes my heart feel good inside.

It just makes me real happy inside to know that all this has come about.

I think one of the really wonderful things is to be able to come back and get a really intimate snapshot of what life was like at that time.

And yes, they were a wealthy family.

So it's one side of the societal picture and yet it really does paint a portrait of what it was like to live in that time.

You know, what it was like to, as my father said, be a family in that particular time.

And it's sort of the inner workings of what life was like.

There's an ownership still there that we've sort of shepherded or taken care of their house.

And I think I'd like to think that they feel like it's theirs too.

I think it's everybody has the same sentiments.

It's going to be a showpiece for all of us to something we can all say we're proud to work on when it's done.

It's just a it's just a unique building.

Exactly.

It's a phenomenal opportunity to experience the richness of art, the richness of history, and the respect for artists and some of the woodworking guys, the carpenters, the tile work, the plaster.

You don't get that chance on every project for those specific trades to really show what you're made of.

And it was nice to see guys that not only saw that as an opportunity for them, but took pride in the fact that they were a part of this.

The House symbolizes all of what Mr. Bass met and and did for the City of Fort Wayne, and I'd like to bring that back a little bit more so that people really realize that they've walked through the process and exactly the right way.

They've done all of their homework, they've worked with consultants, they've worked with the best architects, the best conservators, and they've really done what a building of this grandeur needs in terms of making it work for the next hundred years.

Brookside The essence of the Gilded Age is a permanent part of Indiana history, with its addition to the National Register of Historic Places in 1982, an architectural masterpiece and testament to an industrial icon that Fort Wayne holds in the highest esteem with the careful preservation and tender care of the University of Saint Francis.

The spirit of the base and Leslie families will live on just John and Laura had intended as a drama.

Yeah, we need some drama.

Yeah, I saw have after the hit.

We were on and on Talking faces just a few minutes ago.

This is a bad time.

The preceding program on PBS Fort Wayne, was made possible in part by the Steel Dynamics Foundation, supporting a wide variety of causes, including children and family services, economic development and education in business and technology fields, the Steel Dynamics Foundation, strengthening the communities where our employees live and work.

Funding also provided through generous contributions from these businesses and foundations and from viewers like you.

Thank you.