Michelle Martin-Colman in front of her 1st Street home, featured on the cover of Bloom’s June/July 2016 issue. Photo by Kendall Reeves
by Janet Mandelstam
Michelle Martin-Colman was gathering information for the Monroe County History Center as the homes in her Elm Heights neighborhood approach their centennial, and she decided to share a story about her own East 1st Street house.
As she recounted to her neighbors recently, it was the fall of 2021 when Martin-Colman found a handwritten letter from a young boy on her front porch. Nine-year-old Julian Soots introduced himself as a student at Harmony School and wrote, “I think your house is really cool. I like the stone; it looks very peaceful.” Julian wanted to know if the house had a history or a story to tell.
Of course, the Elm Heights houses do have a history, and Martin-Colman responded to Julian with a four-page letter of her own.
“It warms my heart to know that you like our home,” she wrote of the house where she and her husband, David, have lived since 1985. The house, Martin-Colman recounted, was finished in 1927, and she included a photograph of the workers with Harry Denato, the architect and builder-owner of the house. She explained that, like many in the neighborhood, her home was a “kit house.” A Bloomington engineer, she wrote, told her that he believed Denato used a basic Sears Kit floor plan from Sears, Roebuck, and Co. and added other features “because he had the money and the know-how.”
Martin-Colman recounts that the house was owned by the Henthorn family for some 40 years. When the Colmans bought the house, all of the Henthorns’ possessions were still there. “Moving into this house,” she told Julian, “was like moving into a museum with historic treasures.” And the Colmans have continued to furnish the house with antiques and one-of-a-kind historic objects.
Julian had written to Martin-Colman as part of a school assignment. His teacher at Harmony School, Lana Cruce (who also happens to be his mother), says the class was doing a project on neighborhood history and architecture. “Each student was asked to pick a house that might have an intriguing history,” she said recently, “and I had a connection with that house.” Cruce and Martin-Colman’s son, Gabriel, went to school together. “I love connecting the dots,” says Martin-Colman. Now she is planning for the home’s 100th anniversary. “We will have a walk-through,” she says, “if the floor stays stable.”
