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March 2026

The House That Almost Wasn't

How Wolcottville's oldest home was saved from demolition

By the early 2000s, the oldest house in Wolcottville was dying. George Wolcott had built it around 1838, shortly after he arrived in LaGrange County with his wife Margaret and staked their claim along Little Elkhart Creek. It was an early Greek Revival structure, simple but sturdy, the kind of home a man builds when he intends to stay. And for nearly 170 years, it did stay. It passed between only two families for most of its life, absorbing the quiet seasons of a small Indiana town without complaint.

But by the time the last occupants moved out, the house was in trouble. The roof leaked. An entire addition had collapsed. Windows were broken. The structure was open to the weather and deteriorating fast. Most people in town assumed it was finished. Another old building quietly giving up. It happens all the time in places like this, where preservation money is scarce and the case for tearing something down is always easier to make than the case for saving it.

Rex Fisher didn't see it that way. Fisher, a LaGrange County historian, understood what the Wolcott House represented. It wasn't just an old building. It was a direct, physical link to the founding of the town, the home of the man whose sawmill had drawn the first settlers and whose name the town still carries. Fisher pushed for preservation when almost no one else thought it was worth the fight. He made calls. He made the case. He kept the conversation alive when it would have been easier to let it die.

Through the combined efforts of Indiana Landmarks and the LaGrange County Community Foundation, the house was saved from foreclosure at what felt like the last possible moment. It was purchased by Drs. Daniel and Anna Kragt, who undertook a careful, years-long restoration. The Kragts went further than anyone expected. They tracked down a circa-1760s Connecticut home, the Yale House, and had it disassembled and shipped to Wolcottville piece by piece to be rebuilt on the property. The addition connected the Wolcott family's New England roots to its Indiana legacy in a way that felt deliberate and right.

Today, the Wolcott House is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, one of roughly a dozen structures in all of LaGrange County to carry that distinction. It stands on Wolcott Street, across from Wolcott Park, looking much the way it did when the town was young. It is proof of something that small towns don't always get to prove: that what gets built with care, and fought for with stubbornness, tends to last. The Wolcott House is located on Wolcott Street, across from Wolcott Park. You can see it on your next drive through town.