Samuel G. Bartel Architectural Records Collection

The collection consists of drawings, specifications, correspondence, and contracts from the office of Samuel G. Bartel, “practical architect.” It covers the period from about 1895 to about 1920. The arrangement is chronological.

Bartel did not date most of the documents in the collection. He reliably gave his address; however, and city directories record the dates that his address changed. Estimated dates for the documents have been supplied according to the information from the city directories.

The earliest drawings in the collection are four plates of designs for schools (catalog number 2-1). These date to the period Bartel lived and worked at 88 Germania Avenue in Haughville, ca. 1894 to 1897. They were produced for marketing purposes rather than for a particular client, and it is doubtful that any of the schools were built. The plates depict various designs in plan and elevation, accompanied by explanatory and promotional text. On one plate the author declares, “I make School House Architecture a Specialty.”

A second series of documents (catalog numbers 2-2 through 2-14) was created between about 1900 and 1912, after Haughville (and Bartel’s home) had been annexed by the city of Indianapolis. Most of the designs in this series are for frame houses and double houses, to be located in or near that city. Drawings or specifications give the name of the client and the address of five of the houses: Fred Goepper, house at 415 Holmes Avenue; C. H. Palmer, house on 27th Street between Meridian and Illinois Streets; Mary O’Connor, double house on Pendergast Street; Albert M. and Flora Houser, house at 924-926 N. Bismarck Avenue; Emma Spencer, frame bungalow at 1818 Schurmann Avenue.

Also in this series are designs for a lodge building for the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, Philoxenian Lodge #44, 320 N. Meridian St., and a business building for August M. Boehrm, 2427 W. Washington St.

Two projects are for sites outside Indianapolis: the remodeling of a house for William Ivens Cox at 126 Center Street, Plainfield, and a proposal to the Adams County Commissioners for a county infirmary building (the commissioners selected a different design). The specifications for several projects in the series are distinctive, written in neat script in ink on nine-inch-wide strips of tracing paper.

A third series (catalog numbers 2-15 through 2-20) includes commissions executed while Bartel lived and worked in Muncie and Farmland, from 1913 to about 1920. All six commissions are for sites in Randolph County. They include the Maxville Methodist Episcopal Church in Maxville, a new school building for Stony Creek Township, additions and alterations to the Odd Fellows building in Winchester, a new roof for another commercial building in Winchester, the First National Bank of Farmland, and a house for Orvil Wood in Farmland. The Maxville Methodist Episcopal Church is rated “outstanding” in the Indiana Historic Sites and Structures Inventory, Randolph County Interim Report (1998).

A few miscellaneous business papers are collected in catalog no. 2-21. These include commercially printed contract and specification forms bearing the name “Philipp Pfeiffer, architect” and three items of correspondence, 1915-1920. Pfeiffer may have been a mentor to Bartel. He has not been identified.