Mac Rating: 5.00 | Votes: 1 | Date: 03/07/2026 02:04:00

A brewer built the mansion, but the women stockholders own the story. The Indianapolis Propylaeum at 1410 North Delaware Street occupies the Schmidt-Schaf House, a turreted Queen Anne mansion built in 1890-91 for John W. Schmidt, president of the Indianapolis Brewing Company, and later home to fellow brewing magnate Joseph C. Schaf. The organization behind it is older than the house: in 1888 educator and suffragist May Wright Sewall incorporated the Indianapolis Propylaeum - Greek for gateway, as in gateway to culture - as a stock company whose shares could be owned only by women, one of the first such ventures in the United States. The association's original 1891 clubhouse on East North Street was among the first American buildings financed entirely by women stockholders; when the city bought and demolished it for the World War Memorial Plaza, the stockholders purchased the Delaware Street mansion in 1923 and moved the institution there. The house is a showpiece of the Old Northside: Romanesque, Neo-Jacobean and Queen Anne elements, leaded glass doors, Rookwood fireplace tiles, a grand staircase and intricate Italian carvings, listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973. The Propylaeum has operated continuously as a hub for women's leadership and civic culture: the Indianapolis Woman's Club, the Fortnightly Literary Club, the Daughters of the American Revolution and other organizations have met here for a century, with a Tea Room serving lunches since 1924. Today the mansion and its carriage house run as an event venue as well - weddings, teas, luncheons, lectures and corporate gatherings ring the historic parlors - with rental revenue sustaining the foundation's preservation work. Sewall's wider legacy - co-founder of the forerunner of the Indianapolis Museum of Art and president of the National Council of Women - makes the Propylaeum more than a pretty house: it is the surviving institutional footprint of the city's 19th-century women's movement, still doing its founding job.