Window Treatment Serving The Original Town Plat (1838) and East Main Street

Local Window Treatment Experience in The Original Town Plat (1838) and East Main Street

Housing on the 1838 plat: 1838, 1846 and everything since

The original plat was fifteen blocks and thirty six lots. The old town area today is larger than that, and Hancock County's assessor mapping runs through Beacon and a GeoPower atlas rather than a queryable service, so no parcel level build year exists for any single house here. What is sourced: the 1838 Evans house at 113 East Main, the 1846 building at 115 East Main, rail service arriving in 1869, interurban electric lines in 1900 and 1901, and Zion Lutheran School running continuously since 1853. The housing sitting on that framework is mostly 1870s to 1930s, with 1960s and 2010s infill dropped onto the same blocks.

Styles run from mid-19th century vernacular frame and brick through gable front and wing to Craftsman bungalow, then post war infill on the leftover lots. Heights are mixed: one and two full stories plus the one and a-half story bungalows, with no sourced ratio between them. That mix is the practical problem. On Walnut Street or Larrabee Street a bungalow can sit beside a two story frame house with head heights the better part of a foot apart, and a treatment that suits one reads wrong on the other. New Palestine has no historic district and no National Register listing, so nothing here dictates what you hang. The decision is yours. The constraint is the opening.

Measuring an 1870s East Main opening: square, depth and the storm build up

Start with square. The correct assumption on this plat is that every opening is out of square, and on 163 units aged 85 to 185 years that assumption is right far more often than it's wrong. A three point measure across the width at the head, at the middle and again at the sill will usually give three different numbers here, and the smallest one governs the finished width. Then the factory deduction lands on top: a standard 1/16 inch per side comes off the order regardless. On a factory square 2019 opening in Willow Ridge that's invisible. On an East Main opening already running 3/8 inch narrower at the sill than at the head, the deduction plus the taper is what produces the gap somebody notices from the sofa.

Depth is the second trap. Real wood jambs on the 1838 plat look generous, then a storm window build up takes an inch you can't see from inside the room, and plaster returns in the oldest houses take a little more. Where depth won't carry a headrail flush, an outside mount on the casing is usually the better answer anyway, because it covers the taper instead of advertising it. The shapes here are their own vocabulary: front door transoms, tall narrow openings with high head heights, and storefront glass on the commercial buildings along East Main. There's no two story great room glass anywhere on this plat, which is the exact opposite of Centennial North.

What actually works in the old town blocks

The pattern on East Main, Mill and North Street is a lot of openings, no two alike, in trim worth showing. That points to treatments mounting on the casing rather than fighting for depth inside it, and to products where an out of square opening isn't fatal. The mature street trees here already do shading work no subdivision in New Palestine gets, since the canopy has had 188 years since the 1838 platting to grow, so solar control matters a little less and appearance from the sidewalk matters more, because these houses sit close to the street on original town lots. National price ranges give the bracket: custom treatments run $250 to $2,600 per window and interior shutters $175 to $800, before anything specific to your house.

Around the old plat, from Depot Street to the Town Center site

The 1838 grid straddles US 52, which is Main Street through town, and its streets run true north and south rather than curving. Depot Street is named for the rail corridor that reached New Palestine in 1869, followed by interurban electric lines in 1900 and 1901. Zion Lutheran School has been here since 1853, well before the town was incorporated on 24 June 1871. The 79-acre Town Center project is going in beside these blocks, so a plat drawn in 1838 is about to acquire a modern center next door. Residents say 'in town' to mean this grid, as distinct from the subdivisions and the Sugar Creek Township section roads outside the corporate limits.

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