The History of 1330 Lincoln Way East
Tucked into South Bend’s Lincoln Way East Historic District, the house at 1330 Lincoln Way East — known historically as the Kinzie House — is a two-unit American Foursquare residence built in 1917. It stands today as a designated contributing structure within a district recognized both by local ordinance (1984) and as eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.
From Frontier Land to City Street
The story of this address begins nearly a century before the house itself was built. In 1829, pioneer Christian Holler purchased the surrounding land from the U.S. Land Office in Fort Wayne. He sold it in 1835 to Samuel and Mary Leer, whose original hewn-log cabin is believed to have stood on the property until as late as 1907 — a remarkable holdover from the area’s earliest settlement. Following a family land dispute after Samuel Leer’s death, the property was formally divided among his heirs in 1870, and subsequent generations of the Leer family carved the land into smaller residential lots in 1886, 1888, 1907, and 1923 as South Bend’s population grew.
For decades, the road running past the property was known not as Lincoln Way but as Vistula Avenue, a name believed to derive from a Native American trail that once traced the south bank of the St. Joseph River, linking South Bend and Mishawaka. The street’s transformation into a proper thoroughfare began around 1895, when it was paved in brick and a streetcar line was laid down its center, connecting the two cities. The most significant change came in 1913, when the road was chosen as the route for the Lincoln Highway — the first transcontinental highway in the United States — and was renamed Lincoln Way East in its honor.
A Neighborhood Takes Shape
This new status as a paved, streetcar-served link on a national highway made the area highly desirable for middle-class homebuilders. Between roughly 1890 and 1925, the street filled in rapidly with a mix of architectural styles: Queen Anne, Shingle Style, Craftsman bungalows, and — as seen at 1330 — the American Foursquare. The Foursquare style, with its boxy two-and-a-half-story massing, low hipped roof, and broad front porch, was a practical and popular choice for middle-class families nationwide during this period, and several examples still stand along the same block, including comparable houses built in 1916 and 1922.
The house at 1330 sits between two other notable neighbors documented in the district’s historic survey: the 1905 Queen Anne-style Austin House next door, and the Elias & Elizabeth Good House, a gable-front cottage built around 1895 by local designer-builder David Fisher, who lived just down the street and constructed several of the neighborhood’s homes himself. Many houses in this stretch were built on a slight berm above street level, a design choice that preserved views toward the St. Joseph River below.
Life Along the Lincoln Highway
By the time the Kinzie House was completed in 1917, Lincoln Way East had become one of South Bend’s most architecturally varied residential corridors — a snapshot of the city’s early-20th-century growth, fueled directly by its role as a transportation corridor first for Native American travelers, then streetcar riders, and finally motorists on America’s first coast-to-coast highway. The district’s later recognition as a historic district reflects both this transportation history and its collection of well-preserved early-1900s architecture.