SOUTH BEND — The 167-year-old home of one of South Bend’s prominent early settlers is on the market for the first time since the 1980s.

On the southern edge of the quaint neighborhood sharing his surname, the Horatio Chapin house at 407 W. Navarre St. — the address was historically 601 Park Ave. — will go on sale Wednesday at a list price of $850,000, according to Howard Hanna real estate agent Steve Bizzaro. That amount would exceed any home sale to date in Chapin Park, a residential area northwest of downtown whose red-brick streets are lined with colorful old homes.

Finished in 1857, the 5,000-square-foot Chapin house, with its high ceilings and gable roof, is one of the finest examples of Gothic Revival architecture in northern Indiana, said Ross Van Overberghe, South Bend’s historic preservation administrator.

The home has enjoyed a string of good stewards, though it became known as the pink house in the 1950s after an artistic divorcée chose to add some flare. Restored to its original look in the last 40 years, the house is seeking owner No. 10.

“It takes a particular person and philosophy to buy a house like this,” Gabriel Radle, an outgoing Notre Dame professor who bought the home in 2018 with his wife, told The Tribune. “You don’t really see yourself as owning the house. You see yourself as caring for the house and bringing it forward to pass it on to another generation.”

Radle and his wife, fellow professor Nina Gilbetić, thought they’d be in the home for decades when they joined the university’s theology department in 2018. But new job opportunities at Yale University are pulling them away from South Bend.

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History of South Bend’s Horatio Chapin house

Chapin, a Massachusetts native who moved to South Bend in 1831 and became a longtime employee of the State Bank of Indiana, built the palatial home on a 40-acre wooded lot near the St. Joseph River. He bought the tract in the wake of a failure by another of South Bend’s earliest settlers: Alexis Coquillard.

In 1835, paying more than $1 million in modern money, Coquillard and a business partner bought land between the St. Joseph and Kankakee rivers where they would attempt to dig out a canal run by hydroelectric power. The water didn’t cooperate. It flowed unpredictably, often in the wrong direction.

Chapin bought part of the property from his employer, the State Bank, after Coquillard’s death in 1855. A horticulture buff, he planted gardens and an orchard. Walking paths curved through the trees. The layout was influenced by Andrew Jackson Downing, a New Yorker who wrote a seminal book on American landscape architecture.

The estate stayed in the family for the coming decades, divided along the carriage drive that is now Park Avenue, before lots were split off and sold to other families beginning in the 1880s.

Homebuilder Christopher Fassnacht, who famously built Clement Studebaker’s “Tippecanoe Place,” took over the Chapin house in 1890. Major new construction lasted through 1925, sprinkling the neighborhood with a hodgepodge of homes across six decades.

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By the time Geraldine Hathaway, now 79, and her late husband Keith bought the home in the 1980s, she told The Tribune, it had been painted “Pepto-Bismol pink with eggplant trim.” A prior owner had apparently let their children roller skate on the wooden floors, so they all were replaced. It took more than three years of professional renovations before the Hathaways could even move in.

An interior decorator who ran an architecture firm, Hathaway lived there for three decades until her husband died. She sold the home to Radle in 2018 for $550,000, according to county tax records.

At first she moved directly next door, so she could watch over the landscaping she’d worked hard to maintain. But after shattering her ankle in a freak accident, she moved into a place out of the neighborhood — a newer home with fewer stairs.

“I hope the next people are not just lovers of old homes, but understand that they are costly to maintain, they require constant attention,” Hathaway said, “and that if you do lots of renovation and you bring things back, the job is not over. You have to maintain them every year.”

In 1982, the home and the surrounding neighborhood were placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Chapin house has a new historic neighbor

Bizzaro said he’s been around the neighborhood since the blizzard of 1978 forced him to hole up in Frank’s Place, a bar just south of the Chapin house.

Six years before, residents had organized a neighborhood association to preserve the area’s charm. Now, Bizzaro says, it’s a hotspot for professors and families and mayors.

Bizzaro is hopeful the area will continue its rise after the Poledor house, the century-old former home of the family who ran The Philadelphia candy shop, moved into a lot across from the Chapin house on June 19. The new home replaced an unsightly parking lot.

“This neighborhood has been resurrected,” Bizzaro said, “by personal homeowner investment.”

Contact South Bend Tribune city reporter Jordan Smith at JTsmith@gannett.com. Follow him on X: @jordantsmith09

This article originally appeared on South Bend Tribune: South Bend’s historic Horatio Chapin house for sale