Richmond, Indiana Collection

The projects in this collection are a product of Michael and Mary Raddant Tomlan’s comprehensive architectural and historic survey of Richmond, Indiana, conducted with the help of graduate students and local organizations during Michael Tomlan’s years as an associate professor at Ball State University. The work that Michael and Mary Raddant Tomlan did together culminated to create the book Richmond, Indiana: Its Physical Development and Aesthetic Heritage, which was published in 2003.

Michael Tomlan was born in New York City, New York, on February 16, 1946. Upon graduating from Sweet Home High School in Amherst, New York, Tomlan obtained his bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Tennessee (1967-1973). His graduate work includes a master’s degree in historic preservation from Columbia University (1973-1974) and a Ph.D. in the history of architecture and urban development from Cornell University (1974-1976). He worked at Ball State University from 1977-1979. He is currently a professor and the director of Historic Preservation Planning at Cornell University. Tomlan’s more notable academic works include authoring Historic Preservation: Caring for Our Expanding Legacy (2014) and Tinged with Gold: Hop Culture in the United States (1993) and editing Preservation of What, for Whom? (1997).

Mary Raddant Tomlan was born on May 31, 1940, in West Allis, Wisconsin. She has a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Minnesota (Dec. 1962) and a master’s degree in the history of architecture and urban development (Sept. 1971). She has taught architectural history at the State University of New York at Albany (1966-1973) and part-time at Cornell University (1979-1981). She has worked as an architectural and urban history consultant since 1981, and she currently is the City of Ithaca Historian, a city where she has served as a member of the Ithaca Landmarks Preservation Commission, as a board member of Historic Ithaca and Tompkins County, and as a volunteer worker in the Reference Library of the History Center of Tompkins County.

Michael Tomlan helped to establish the College of Architecture and Planning’s Drawings and Documents Archive. In 1977, shortly after he arrived at Ball State, Tomlan served on a Committee for the Preservation of Architectural Records in Indianapolis, which was formed to address the influx of architectural materials that architectural firms (many of which were closing down due to an economic slump) wished to donate. Ball State, the only university in Indiana at the time with a state-sponsored architecture college, became the eventual home for these materials. The materials (including our remarkable Daggett Architectural Records Collection) found a variety of homes around campus until the new architecture building, with an official space for the Drawings and Documents Archive, was constructed.