Hughes Building

Built 1900

The Hughes Building was built in 1900. The cost to build it was $10,000. John Hughes built it and was preparing to build another building on the corner of Lincoln and Main Street at the time of his death.

Mr. Hughes came to America from Ireland as a child. At 18, his family settled in the Marshall County area between Plymouth and Bremen after growing up in the Cincinnati area. He had been a farmhand and that's where he began to dig ditches. In 1886, he started dredging. He worked on the Turkey Creek ditch in Kosciusko and Elkhart County. At one time he owned a hundred acres of good farming land. He converted some of this into real estate in Nappanee.

In 1896, A.H. Kaufman and his brother-in-law J.I. Norris came from Lagrange to look for locations to open a store. They contracted one year for the Uline Room that had been vacated by the hardware stock. Mr. Uline overhauled the room, brightening it with new paper and paint, and rearranged some of the shelving. He then opened his store in the building where Lehman Furniture had been located. They occupied that space for seven years.

After that, they moved to the Hughes building on the southwest corner of Main and Market Street.