"The Little Brick House"
Columbia City, Whitley County, Indiana
Marker Inscription
Built in 1866 By Columbia City, Indiana banker Franklin H. Foust Purchased in 1915 By John C. & Fanny Myers Gifted in 1936 To their daughter, Mary B. Anthes 2003 - 2005 Saved from destruction, Moved, & rebuilt by her grandson & his wife, Greg & Jan Anthes… transcription continues on the marker
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The Story
Built in 1866 by Columbia City banker Franklin H. Foust, this modest brick dwelling has passed through generations of local families—purchased in 1915 by John C. and Fanny Myers, then gifted in 1936 to their daughter Mary B. Anthes. In the early 2000s it faced demolition but was saved, moved, and rebuilt by her grandson Greg Anthes and his wife Jan, a labor of family preservation. The house stands as a survivor from the years just after the Civil War, when Indiana's county-seat towns were prospering and putting up permanent brick homes.
Why it matters
The Little Brick House traces one Indiana family's connection to a single dwelling across nearly a century and a half, and shows how private preservation can rescue an ordinary 19th-century home from being lost.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1866, the Civil War had just ended, and towns across northern Indiana were exhaling and building. Columbia City, the seat of Whitley County, was one of those young county-seat towns finding its footing — a place with a courthouse square, a rail connection, and ambitions to become permanent rather than provisional.
Brick was a statement in those years. Most early settlers had raised frame or log houses, quick to build and quick to burn. A brick home meant a family — or a banker with capital to spare — was planting roots and betting on the town's future. The years just after the war, running into the Gilded Age, were exactly when that kind of confidence took physical form on Indiana's small-town streets.
That is the world this modest dwelling was born into: a country stitching itself back together, a Midwest filling in, and a county seat trading impermanence for something meant to last.
People & events
The house begins with Franklin H. Foust, a Columbia City banker, who built it in 1866. A banker's home in a growing county seat tells you something about the man and the moment — someone with means, invested in the town's money and its permanence.
Half a century on, in 1915, the house passed to John C. and Fanny Myers. Then, in 1936 — in the teeth of the Great Depression, when many families were losing homes rather than giving them — the Myerses gifted the house to their daughter, Mary B. Anthes. A house handed down within a family across generations carries a different weight than one simply bought and sold.
The last chapter is the most dramatic. In the early 2000s the little house faced demolition. Between 2003 and 2005, Mary's grandson Greg Anthes and his wife Jan saved it — moving it and rebuilding it rather than letting it fall. That is not a developer's calculation; it is an act of devotion to a place that had held four generations of one family.
Its place in the American story
Grand mansions and famous addresses get the plaques, but the American landscape is mostly made of houses like this one — ordinary, well-built, lived-in homes that quietly absorbed a century and a half of family life. They are the true architecture of the country, and they are the ones most easily lost.
What happened here also speaks to a broader American story: preservation as a private, personal act. Not every historic structure is saved by a foundation or a government grant. Countless old buildings survive only because one family decided a place was worth the trouble of rescuing. Moving and rebuilding a house is expensive, difficult, and rarely rational on a spreadsheet — which is exactly why it stands as testimony to what people value beyond money.
In miniature, this house holds the arc of the post-Civil War Midwest: the confidence to build in brick, the endurance to pass a home through generations, and the will, generations later, to keep it standing.
If you visit
Look first at the brick itself. A house built in 1866 and later dismantled, moved, and reassembled is a small marvel of patience — imagine the care it took to keep those walls intact through the journey.
Stand back and take in the scale. This is not a showpiece; it's a home, sized for an ordinary family, which is exactly what makes it worth pausing over. Picture the same rooms holding the Fousts, then the Myerses, then Mary Anthes across the decades.
Columbia City sits in the countryside of northeast Indiana, easy to fold into a wandering drive through the county-seat towns of the region. Give the little house a few minutes and let it do what good old houses do — remind you that history isn't only made by the famous, but by families who simply stayed, and by descendants who refused to let their home disappear.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Franklin H. Foust
- · John C. Myers
- · Fanny Myers
- · Mary B. Anthes
- · Greg Anthes
- · Jan Anthes
Themes & tags
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