More Amazing Tales from Indiana by Fred D. Cavinder

Author:Fred D. Cavinder [Cavinder, Fred D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Folklore & Mythology
ISBN: 9780253216533
Google: Vqa3S-HlqkoC
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2003-01-15T03:29:07+00:00

No Stone Unturned

No one seems to have thought John Mittendorf had rocks in his head at the time. But he certainly had them all over his six-acre home between Metamora and Brookville.

His Boulder House along U.S. 52 has stopped traffic for 60 years. Little wonder. Mittendorf’s stone estate, nearly 40 years in the making at a cost of $40,000, is built with millions of rocks. It is an impressive visual oddity.

Mittendorf, a Cincinnati candymaker, was said to have been impressed with stone construction during a visit to Switzerland. He ordered rocks from all 48 states at the time, gathered more from a wide area of Indiana, and started building his estate in 1907. Workers helped with moving stones and mixing mortar, sometimes cutting stones, but Mittendorf placed all the rocks in cement himself. Sometimes he had children come out from Brookville and search the bed of the creek near the house for suitable stones.

Mittendorf also used stones to build a garage, four porches, terraces, long fences, arches, gate posts, steps, a foot bridge, a yard bench, a water fountain, a well house, a gazebo, and even an outhouse. Inside the house, a massive stone fireplace was constructed and some walls were layered with rocks. Porches on each side of the house resulted from highway changes. About 1932, with the house half done, U.S. 52 was rerouted from the north side of his property to the south side. So he made all four sides of the house look like main entrances.

By the time Mittendorf finished the stone estate in the mid-1940s, his health was failing. He spent time in Florida and died in Cincinnati in the 1950s. Mittendorf reportedly had been married, but his wife disliked the bucolic atmosphere at the Boulder House. She never accompanied him when he spent most of each summer at the estate.

At his death, Mittendorf is said to have willed the estate to his longtime nurse, who sold it. The Boulder House passed through a series of owners. In 1988 it was purchased by John L. Bruening and his wife, Anna, at a Veterans Administration foreclosure. They later sold it to Andrew and Rachel Mappes of Indianapolis, schoolteachers who in 1993 had undertaken sprucing up the historic place. Both the Bruenings and the Mappes have sensed a ghost, maybe Mittendorf. They have heard sounds, and Mappes reported feeling watched when he was repairing the stone walls.

Travelers on U.S. 52 may understand if Mittendorfs ghost has returned to monitor his life’s work; it has had an eerie magnetism for everyone for decades, just as it had for Mittendorf when he was alive.

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