A Correction and More on the Miesse Building

From Time to Thyme

By Paula Dunn

This turned out to be another reader / this and that column.

To begin, I have a correction to make.

Larry Cloud pointed out that a person who’s celebrated their 90th birthday isn’t in their ninth decade. They’ve actually started on their tenth decade.

He’s right. I checked.

That’s what I get for trying to come up with a different way to say what I basically write every year when I salute the Notable Nineties. Next time I’ll try to remember to use the term, “Nonagenarian.” (Did you know that’s what someone in their 90s is called? I had to look it up!)

Now, I need a moment to vent a little.

It used to be considered a public service to publicize obituaries. I remember seeing death notices posted in the windows of the Sheridan News and the Hudler Press (a former publisher of the Times) as soon as they learned someone had passed away. They didn’t wait for their papers to be published to spread the word.

Until relatively recently, newspapers conveniently provided a single source for local obituaries. Today, obituaries have almost disappeared from the newspapers.

If you want to keep track of this county’s deaths now, you have to check the websites of about a half dozen mortuaries — if not additional ones from surrounding counties — on a daily basis. It’s a time-consuming and rather ghoulish hobby.

The last few years I’ve had to search the entire internet in December for each name on the Notable Nineties list in order to keep the list current. Sure, I can do that, but it doesn’t keep me from missing funerals during the rest of the year.

The disappearance of obituaries from newspapers is a disservice to all of us, but especially to members of the older generation. Many seniors aren’t computer-savvy and I’ve found that even those who are tend to give it up after a point.

Can’t something be done about this?

While researching the collapse of the Zeckel building, I ran across additional information about the building that I thought was worth noting. I didn’t want to include it in the previous column, however, because it would have taken away from the main subject, the collapse.

I noticed that all the Noblesville Daily Ledger stories from 1952 referred to the Zeckel’s building as the “Joseph Building.” I questioned that and went digging to see if I was right.

Thanks to a history of the Odd Fellows Noblesville lodge (I. O.O.F. No. 125,) in the January 27, 1882 Noblesville Independent, I’m confident that the original three-story building, of which Zeckel’s eventually became a part, was actually the Miesse Building, not the Joseph Building.

Both Dr. David Miesse and his son, Dr Adam Miesse, ran their practices from that location. (If “Miesse” sounds familiar, it may be because I’ve written about Adam’s daughter, Lulu. Librarian Lulu Miesse was the driving force behind Noblesville acquiring its Carnegie library.)

According to the Odd Fellows’ 1882 account, their lodge moved into “our present hall” (the third floor of the Miesse Block) in 1866.

That makes the Miesse building one of the oldest buildings on the courthouse square, if not THE oldest. The buildings on the north and east sides of the square date from the Gas Boom of the 1880s.

I couldn’t find any connection between the Zeckel’s building and the Joseph family, although admittedly I was unable to come up with names for the two two-story buildings that were later incorporated into the Miesse Building.

There definitely was a Joseph Building on the south side of the courthouse square, though. I believe it was the one two doors east of the alley that actually says “Joseph” at the top. (You can still see the “Joseph.”) That’s the former location of the J. Joseph & Co. clothing store.

Paula Dunn’s From Time to Thyme column appears on Wednesdays in The Times. Contact her at younggardenerfriend@gmail.com