History 301: Putting together the pieces of the puzzle

By Connie Zeigler

One of the reasons I love researching and writing history is because it’s a lot like putting

The vacant strcuture at the corner of Walnut Street and Senate Avenue was once the meeting home of the Colored Knights of Pythias.

together a puzzle. We all know that a puzzle is a photograph reproduced on cardboard and then cut into pieces. Eventually puzzle pieces get lost. Imagine how many pieces of a puzzle would be lost after 50 or 100 years. Think about how missing pieces make it difficult to see what the original photograph was like, and then you sort of grasp the challenge of historic research.

History is one big puzzle.

When a historian is trying to research or write history about a particular subject, no matter how much research is done, he or she is always looking at a puzzle with a lot of missing pieces creating a lot of gaps in the picture. Sometimes there is more gap than picture. Other times you don’t even know how big the picture was originally so there’s no way to figure out how much is missing.

But the beauty of history is that each time a bit of information is found, it fills in one of those gaps and sometimes even one little piece of information creates linkages that complete a lot more of the puzzle.

Those little bits of information are the real treasure that historians spend their time hunting (pardon the mixed metaphor). And, if a historian works on a particular topic for a long period of time, like for instance, the history of Indianapolis, those little treasures show up unexpectedly and can draw you back to a puzzle you’d given up on long ago.

I found one of those little treasured bits a while ago, and it fit right into a puzzle that I’d put away years before. And I found it when I was working on a project that was completely unrelated to the original one.

The puzzle I was working on a few years back was my master’s thesis in history. My thesis was on three amusement parks in Indianapolis, all of which opened as full-bore Coney Island-type parks in 1906. Last month’s Urban Times column on Wonderland Amusement Park was taken from information in my thesis written several years ago.

If you read that column you may remember that the Colored Knights of Pythias organization was the last group to visit Wonderland Amusement Park before it burned down. In fact, the Pythians left the park at about 11 p.m. and the fire that burned it to the ground was reported about 1 a.m. That’s a piece of information that may seem obscure at this point, but it’s going to fit into the puzzle I’m putting together here. So don’t lose it.

A couple of years ago I was working for a company which was hired to evaluate all the properties along the proposed path of the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. I was the historian who did the research and evaluation on three legs of the trail, including the one that runs along Walnut Street over to the Canal.

Not surprisingly, looking at and evaluating all the buildings roughly between Mass Ave and Indiana Avenue to see if any should be recommended for listing on the National Register of Historic Places was a fairly large job. There were lots of old buildings – many of them great, historically significant buildings. This leg of the trail included the Indiana War Memorial, Tyndall Armory, the Masonic Temple, the Scottish Rite, old automobile factories, old churches, old apartments and the public library, to name a handful of the significant buildings in the area.

One building I took note of while looking at this area was a three-story brick edifice at the corner of Walnut Street and Senate Avenue. It intrigued me because it has crosses worked into the brick courses around the cornice just below the roofline. Other than those crosses, though, it was a pretty non-descript early 20th century commercial building with window openings which had been closed with concrete block, a new door and nothing architecturally significant about it. I noted it, took a photo and went about my work of thoroughly documenting the clearly significant buildings with high historic integrity – those which might be eligible for the National Register.

Fast forward to 2009 when a local blogger sent me an e-mail asking if I knew anything about the building at the corner of Senate Avenue by the Cultural Trail. Hmmm. Sounded familiar. I looked it up on Google street view.

It was that three-story brick building with the crosses in the cornice.

Since the blogger asked what the building had been used for historically, I decided to find that bit of information for him if I could. I looked up the address in the 1910 City Directory, which is conveniently online at the IUPUI University Library website.

That building, which showed up in my work project and now again a few years later in an email, turned out to be the meeting hall of the Colored Knights of Pythias.

Remember those Colored Pythians who celebrated their biennial gathering at Wonderland Amusement Park, one of three parks I’d researched and written about in my thesis? The folks who had frolicked at Wonderland on the night it burned down, who also happened to be the first group of African-American customers at any Indianapolis amusement park, held their meetings at that building with the crosses on Senate Avenue.

I found a puzzle piece I didn’t even know was missing. That discovery made those Pythians so much more real. It gave me goose bumps. And reminded me why I love history.

Connie Zeigler is president and owner of C. Resources, Inc. Connie is a writer and a historic preservationist who consults on preservation and greening of historic buildings. She lives in Fountain Square and blogs at INArchitecture on cresourcesinc.blogspot. com.