Read time: 4 min.

A stately, sprawling Queen Anne home rises just west of the entrance to Richmond’s Glen Miller Park along US-40, and it’s hard not to slow down when it comes into view. The building’s apparent decay only deepens the intrigue for anyone passing through! It hints that this house has lived more than one life. Indeed it has! Among its former identities is one that stopped me cold: the Crain Sanitarium. 

Pinning down the exact date the old Crain Sanitarium was built turns out to be surprisingly tricky. Local historians place its construction around 1890¹. Meanwhile, the county assessor pegs it a decade later, in 1900². If that wasn’t enough, the property’s abstract credits Mary Hurst and Sarah Ellen Jordan with building the home in 1903³. The dates may be fuzzy, but one moment in the building’s story is clear: on June 1, 1921, Drs. C.J. and Elizabeth Crain opened the house as the Crain Sanitarium, shortly after relocating to Richmond after a decade spent practicing in Union City⁴.

In the 1920s, Crain Sanitarium billed itself as an “exclusive osteopathic institution maintained for the benefit of osteopathic physicians and their patients⁵.” Drs. Crain, a husband-and-wife team, “accomplished some remarkable results through ‘Milk and Rest Cure,’ a natural way back to health assisted by osteopathy⁶.” 

The Crains practiced under full licenses issued by the Medical Board of the State of Indiana, which allowed them to perform surgery and obstetrics and granted authority extending to the use of “narcotics, antiseptics, chloroform, poisons, and so forth⁷.” In other words, Crain Sanitarium occupied sort of a strange middle ground between alternative healing and mainstream medical practice.

Crain Sanitarium operated for about twenty years. In 1945, city directories listed the building as a nurse’s residence⁸. Two years later, it was home to the Glen Aire Hospital, sometimes known as the Glen-Aire Nursing Home, “specializing in the Care of Convalescing Patients⁹.” The old sanitarium also operated as the Glen Aire Tourist Home in the 1950s and early 1960s¹⁰, which offered “modern sleeping rooms for rent by the week or night, with “constant hot water, good heat, and use of phone¹¹.” 

The property was back to being a nursing home by 1972. Unfortunately, that chapter ended abruptly when the State Board of Health refused to renew Glen Aire’s license. Filings cited a troubling list of fire safety and health deficiencies¹². The old building eventually found new life as apartments, but that revival proved short-lived, and foreclosure followed¹³. The story of the old sanitarium could have ended there, but an unlikely lifeline emerged when First Merchants Bank gifted it to Preserve Richmond. Working alongside Indiana Landmarks and the Richmond Historic Preservation Commission, the group secured protective easements for the landmark¹³. 

Unfortunately, a series of subsequent owners have been unable to make much visible progress toward preserving or restoring the historic structure¹⁴. Even with good intentions and protective measures in place, meaningful rehabilitation of the old Crain Sanitarium has remained frustratingly out of reach. More than 120 years after it was first built, the landmark stands in a kind of suspended animation where its future lingers in limbo as it waits for the right moment and the right steward to finally turn the page on its long story. I hope it can hold out for future reuse.

Sources Cited
1 Engle, B. (2008, August 5). B&B plans fall through. The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 3. 
2 Wayne County Office of Information & GIS Services. (2025). Parcel ID: 89-16-33-440-224.000-030. Wayne County, Indiana Assessor. map, Richmond, IN.
3 Tidrow, B. (1996, March 16). Home restoration project is long journey. The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 14. 
4 The Crain Sanitarium (1923, July 16). The Richmond Item. p. 8. 
5 (See footnote 4).
6 (See footnote 4). 
7 (See footnote 4). 
8 (See footnote 1). 
9 Glen-Aire Nursing Home (1948, February 24). The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 3. 
10 (See footnote 1). 
11 Modern Sleeping Rooms (1952, November 2). The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 29. 
12 State Board Refuses License For Glen Aire Nursing Home (1972, July 8). The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. 2. 
13 Truitt, J. (2020, September 2). Property’s future remains unclear after lawsuit dismissed. The Richmond Palladium-Item. p. A1. 
14 (See footnote 13).