Nicholson-Rand House
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Nicholson–Rand House
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| Location | 5010 W. Southport Rd., Indianapolis, Decatur Township, Marion County, Indiana |
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| Coordinates | 39°39′38″N 86°14′46″W / 39.66056°N 86.24611°WCoordinates: 39°39′38″N 86°14′46″W / 39.66056°N 86.24611°W |
| Area | 2 acres (0.81 ha) |
| Architect | Nicholson, David; et al. |
| Architectural style | Gothic Revival |
| NRHP Reference # | 03000542 |
| Added to NRHP | June 22, 2003 |
The Nicholson–Rand House is a historic home located in Decatur Township, Marion County, Indiana, in Indianapolis. It was moved by the Historic Landmarks Foundation of Indiana (HLFI) half a mile south to save it from being demolished in 1997 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003. The house is an example of the Gothic Revival style of American architecture typified by Alexander Jackson Davis and Andrew Jackson Downing in the mid-19th century.
Andrew Jackson Downing advocated "truth in architecture" while celebrating the picturesque and asymmetrical, and the use of tracery and carving as ornamentation. The Nicholson-Rand House is an American version of Gothic Revival as developed by Downing, built with native materials. Downing's illustrations of country houses are reflected in this house's asymmetry, picturesque windows, projecting eaves with decorated rafter tails and brackets, board-and-batten siding beneath the gables, lacy bargeboard, the many dormers, the entrance porch with its chamfered posts and scrollwork brackets, and the shape of the chimneys. Still relatively rural today, in 1876 the house was two to three hours from downtown Indianapolis by horseback or wagon over twelve miles (19 km) of winding dirt roads. The nearest railroad depot was at Valley Mills, an hour's walk away.
Downing's principles anticipated several elements of Craftsman houses, and even the work of Frank Lloyd Wright, as noted by architectural historian Vincent J. Scully Jr. It is likely that the builder of the house, contractor and stonemason David Nicholson, was familiar with the popular books of Downing. His book Cottage Residences first appeared in 1842 and subsequent editions appeared regularly over the next three decades. Downing's The Architecture of Country Houses was published in 1850, shortly before Nicholson arrived in America. Nicholson likely gathered ideas from several other pattern books that proliferated in the 1860s and 1870s. The popular works of architect and engineer George E. Woodward, for example, whose designs to a great degree follow the lead of Davis and Downing may have influenced Nicholson. Woodward's two volume Architecture and Rural Art and his Country Homes and Woodward's National Architect were all published in the 1860s and reprinted numerous times. Elements of Nicholson's house are present in several patterns in each of Woodward's books, but the general influence still appears to derive from Downing.
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