On your left is a two-story brick-and-limestone building shaped like a refined town house, with a round turret capped by a conical roof and a recessed entrance tucked into the façade.
In eighteen ninety-five, Albert H. Kelley gave South Bend something delightfully sly. He commissioned this place for his South Bend Remedy Company, a mail-order patent medicine firm - meaning packaged cures sold with grand promises - but he dressed the business as an elegant private home. That was quite deliberate. Kelley meant this to appear as the end bay of a row of fashionable houses, though the rest never arrived. The result is wonderfully singular: South Bend’s only commercial building designed to pass as a residence.
Kelley had gambled on that trade in eighteen ninety-two, when he left a secure post at Studebaker Brothers to chase a riskier fortune. His most famous product, Magnolia Blossom, won worldwide attention as a remedy for what advertisements called “women’s complaints.” The exterior sells that illusion of gentility with remarkable care. And the performance continued inside. The upper floor held a large meeting room, and later a remarkably intact nineteen-twenties bathroom survived there, complete with yellow-and-black glazed tile, decorative sinks on chrome legs, original light fixtures, and even the bathtub.
After Kelley died in nineteen twenty-four, and his son died four years later, the company closed. The building endured by moving twice - first in nineteen eighty-eight, then again in two thousand three. Another image shows the corner where it first stood, long since cleared for the South Bend Tribune. For all its reinventions, this little impostor remains the last survivor of South Bend’s patent-medicine world. When you’re ready, continue on to the next stop.
