Meet the family moving into the Fowler House, a Lafayette landmark
Built for Moses and Eliza Fowler and later a museum, the 19th century mansion hadn’t had a family living in it since 1941, until Mark and Laura Ward and their seven kids moved in this month.
Thanks to Stuart & Branigin for continued support of the Based in Lafayette reporting project.
MEET THE FAMILY MOVING INTO THE FOWLER HOUSE
Nearly a week after moving the first boxes and seven children from their home in the Highland Park neighborhood and into the Fowler House – literally a former museum and 19th century Lafayette landmark near South Ninth and South streets that hasn’t had someone living in it since the start of World War II – Mark and Laura Ward say they’re still coming to grips with a decision they agree they had to be a little crazy to take on.
“Like I told Laura just the other morning, five days in a row I woke up in the Fowler House,” Mark Ward said. “It’s just starting to settle in, it’s a little unreal.”
The Wards closed on the Fowler House, originally built for the family of Moses and Eliza Fowler, earlier in January. They purchased it from the 1852 Foundation, a nonprofit that bought the mansion a decade ago from the Tippecanoe County Historical Association and maintained it as an events venue and restaurant.
Amid toys in the living room and boxes stacked waiting to unpack in the parlor, dining room, foyer and bedrooms, the Wards said this weekend they still want to make the Fowler House a community space, open in some sort of reasonable way.
But moving into a mansion that Indiana Landmarks considers one of the outstanding examples of historic Gothic Revival residential architecture in the state, the Wards say, was about making the roughly 8,000 square feet of living space in the Fowler House into their home.
“It’s a historic landmark that seems an essential part of the community,” Mark Ward said. “People feel invested in it. You tell someone, ‘We bought the Fowler House,’ and there’s invariably two or three seconds where you see them process it. And they’re like, ‘Oh, the Fowler House.’”
“That’s almost always followed by, ‘My brother got married there,’ or ‘My book club met there’ or ‘I went to a reception there,’ or something like that,” Laura Ward said. “So, we get it. I was worried when we bought it that people wouldn’t like a family living here. But overall, we’ve had overwhelming support from people who knew. … This is where we live now – which is an idea we’re still getting used to.”
