If you weren’t able to attend our guided tour of the Waterman building, don’t despair–we caught much of the tour on video! Take a virtual spin through this historic structure, which was first built as a blacksmith shop in the 1880s. In addition to serving the needs of the local community for 140 years, the site also played a key role in broader area history: In the 1890s, it served as a weigh station for farmers taking their goods downtown to City Market. Around 1920, it was the site of the area’s first service station. The large shop building at the southeast end was one of the city’s earliest truss structures. It was also where many of the city’s trucks and school buses, the original Indiana State Fair shuttles, and at least one Franklin Township Volunteer Fire Department fire truck were custom-built.
Special thanks to Don and Connie Waterman for sharing the history of this important Franklin Township landmark with us!
FUN FRANKLIN TOWNSHIP FACT: Five Points–the region near the intersection of the Michigan Road (now Southeastern Avenue) and Five Points Road, where the Waterman building is located–was so named because the roads that intersect there divide the land into five converging “points,” as you can see on the map below. Later, when Interstate 465 cut through the area, East Troy Avenue was truncated and Southeastern Avenue was displaced and widened, but the five points of Five Points remain more or less unchanged from when the area was named more than a century and a half ago.